Shifts In Orality/ Literacy In E-c Simultaneous Interpreting

Orality and literacy in interpreting is an issue much underexplored both in China and abroad. Miriam Shlesinger, as one of the pioneers on this subject, believes that simultaneous interpreting exerts an “equalizing effect” on the position of a text on the oral-literate continuum, consistently rendering a markedly oral text more literate, and a literate text more oral. However, Shlesinger’s findings are limited to simultaneous interpreting between English and Hebrew only and she failed to explore the reasons behind the shift. So far almost no studies have been conducted to orality in simultaneous interpreting between English and Chinese.To fill this gap, this study examines orality in simultaneous interpreting from English to Chinese, trying to determine whether there could be any shift in the level of orality/ literacy of a text after simultaneous interpreting, and what might be the reasons for those shifts. To achieve this goal, the author first selects nine features characterizing spoken or written language which will be used as criteria for differentiating orality from literacy. The incidences of these features in both the source and target texts will be counted and compared with the help of SPSS 13.0 to see if there are any significant increases or reductions in the numbers. Then it can be inferred, based on the changes in the incidences of those features whether there are shifts towards greater orality or literacy during simultaneous interpreting.The materials used in this study comes from the keynote speech session from the 69 th United Nations General Assembly, a high-level meeting on the rule of law in both national and international levels, which is highly formal and literate. After examining the English ST and its respective Chinese TT, the study found that simultaneous interpreting diminished the literacy of the highly literate ST. In other words, after simultaneous interpreting, the target text is more oral than the source text. The author then used Adaptation Theory and Effort Model to explore the possible reasons behind such shifts in orality. On the one hand, shift of text position on the oral literate continuum to the oral end could be attributed to linguistic adaptability which requires the interpreter to adapt his language use at every linguistic structure to the context so as to satisfy the communicative needs. One the other hand, it can also be explained by cognitive overloading and lower language proficiency.