The Influence Of Vivid Expressions On The Performance Of Chinese To English Simultaneous Interpretation And Coping Tactics

The thesis, through theoretical and empirical studies, looks into the influence of vivid Chinese expressions on the performance of Chinese to English simultaneous interpretation, and offers feasible coping tactics for interpreters, including explanation, summary, omission, and plain translation.The thesis is based on the effort model theory proposed by Daniel Gile. It is the theoretical foundation for explaining the difficulties that vivid Chinese expressions may pose to interpreters'cognitive efforts and processing capacity, the failure sequence they may cause, and, consequently, their potential influence on the overall performance of simultaneous interpretation. For developing translation strategies, the thesis refers to Eugene Nida's functional equivalence theory and Susan Bassnett's cultural translation theory. The thesis also introduces previous studies on the features of Chinese language, and studies on the translation and interpretation of vivid Chinese expressions. Additionally, the thesis takes into consideration previous studies on the requirements and strategy preferences of government speech interpretation.The empirical studies in this thesis focus on the influence of vivid Chinese expressions on the performance of Chinese to English simultaneous interpretation, as well as interpreters'coping tactics. The experiment invites 8 second-year graduate school students majoring in simultaneous interpretation who have received professional training in this field, to interpret simultaneously in a mock conference scenario. The author develops a set of grading criteria and grades the subjects' performance accordingly. By analyzing the data and examining the translations, the author draws the conclusions that, in Chinese to English simultaneous interpretation, vivid Chinese expressions trigger problems, cause failure sequences, and affects the accuracy, fluency and overall interpretation performance; that, according to the purpose, underlying message and contextual role of the vivid expression, the interpreter can use tactics such as explanation, summary, omission, plain translation and equivalent English expressions; and that effectively coping with vivid expressions can help improve the interpretation performance.