The Use Of Contrastive Discourse Markers In English-chinese Interpretation By Chinese English Majors

In recent years, the study of discourse markers has attracted constant attention inboth international and domestic academics, because there are still many blank gaps inthe research of the nature of the discourse markers, the functions, the features ofmeaning, the category, the operation mechanism and so on, also with the differentstandards and visual angles, the linguists in both at home and aboard have a heatedand long standing debate on the question of discourse markers. But most of thescholars believe that the discourse markers are made of conjunctions, adverbs, orsome kind of phrases and minor sentences, they’ve got only procedural meaning butno conceptual meaning, and that they do not constitute the semantic content of theutterance, rather informative markers for the utterance interpretation. This paper willselect contrastive discourse markers as one of the discourse markers categories, usethe learner corpus (Parallel Corpus of the Chinese EFL Learners)as the research angleof view, try to explore the Chinese EFL learners’ interpretation strategies of thecontrastive discourse markers in English-Chinese interpretation.By the2000edition of Teaching Syllabus for English majors, interpretation isone single item of a variety of English skills in the comprehensive practice courses.And the interpretation class is a basic skill course for the senior students. At the sametime, by the2005edition of National TEM-8speaking and interpretation test syllabus,the oral English test is made up of speaking and interpretation. The grading indicatorsincluding English-Chinese interpreting ability, Chinese-English interpreting ability,the ability to share comments, intonation and pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary.Thus it can be seen that interpretation has played an important part of the test.Discourse markers can determine the consistency of the sentences from the pragmaticperspective and prompt the communication activities to go smoothly by reducing theeffort and cost while the interpreter understands the source language. So the correctinterpretation strategies of the discourse markers can improve the interpretation quality of the students.With the framework of Relevance Theory, this paper is based on the learnercorpus (Parallel Corpus of the Chinese EFL Learners), using the corpus retrievalsoftware to count the interpretation strategies of discourse markers that the Englishmajors used from2003to2007. At the same time, I collect the data of the professionalinterpreters from interpreting topics on the internet (www.kouyi.org), and then countthe interpretation strategies of the professional interpreters. By the comparison of theinterpretation strategies of the learners and the professionals, try to figure out thedifferences and similarities, and further explore how to guide the English majors toadopt the right interpretation strategies By studying comparatively, the conclusionsummarized as follows:1. The interpretation strategies that the Chinese English majors adopted inEnglish-Chinese interpretation include: omission, retention and variation. Aftercollecting the detailed sampled statistics from the Parallel Corpus of the Chinese EFLLearners I found that the omission strategy accounts for25.27%, the retention strategyaccounts for59.19%and the variation strategy accounts for15.53%.2. The interpretation strategies that the Chinese English majors adopted inEnglish-Chinese interpretation show differences between the learners and theprofessionals. Retrieval and statistical sampling results of the professional Chinese-English interpretation data reveal that omission strategy accounts for5.86%, theretention strategy accounts for93.01%and the variation strategy accounts for1.12%.Judging by the percentage of each translation strategies, the Chinese English learnersuse omission strategy more than the professionals, use retention strategy less than theprofessionals, and use variation strategy more than the professionals. So comparedwith the learners, professional interpreters use more retention strategy to interpret thecontrastive discourse markers, and use less omission strategy and variation strategy.3. Based on the above statistics, the suggestions for future study were obtainedby comparison. Firstly, fully grasp the source language in the process of interpretation,have a solid understanding of the meaning of discourse markers, master the basicverbatim translation or the literal translation. Secondly, learn to adjust to ensure the interpretation of the core information and sacrifice the secondary information, omitselectively according to the information processing capabilities of oneself at thecurrent time. Finally, the teacher should pay much attention to the Sino-Britishdifferences, enlarge the knowledge range and background knowledge, and increasethe knowledge reserves which are related with the source language.