The Processing Of Subject-prominent Sentences In English-cinese Consecutive Interpreting

With the accelerating process of globalization, China has gained increasinginternational attention for its profound cultural deposit and growing culture soft power.The expanding need for knowledge about Chinese culture and tradition has resulted, forinstance, the two-hour drama documentary produced for Discovery Channel by LionTelevision. The language used in the program features a literary style in writing,containing large amount of subject-prominent sentences, which could clearly reflect thedifferences of language structures between English and Chinese.According to the finding by Charles Li and Sandral Thompson, English is asubject-prominent language while Chinese is a topic-prominent language. In sentences,English tends to use the basic form of subject-predicate structures while Chinese will usemore topic-comment structures. As for an interpreter, he or she has to realize thetransformation between these two distinct modes of linguistic thinking.. The present authorstarts from interpreting the case material, analyzing the difficulties in its interpretation,summarizing coping strategies based on existing theoretical framework, in the hope that itwill provide effective reference for future interpreting trainings and practices.