A Report On The Interpretation Of Sean Carroll’s “The Big Picture” Talk At Google

This is a report on how to cope with the high speech rate in the source language in English-Chinese simultaneous interpreting.The material used is Sean Carroll’s speech about cosmology and philosophy,titled “The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life,Meaning,and the Universe Itself”.Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist and has given the speech on Talk at Google under a circumstance with no political concerns.One main feature of the material is that the speaker uses a high speech rate and standard pronunciation,with few stops,fillings,slips of tongue and hardly any redundant information.In addition,the speech involves a lot of professional terms with a clear logic as well as much complex information.This report mainly focuses on the coping strategy of intensive information and complex information in high speech rate source language.For the former,various omission skills are used according to different situations while,for the later,diverse syntactic linearity skills are used to keep the word order of the source language.This report aims to provide interpreters with a few effective methods to deal with the high speech rate source language when doing simultaneous interpretation.By referring to these methods,interpreters are expected to reduce delays and their efforts in short-term memory and speech production so as to improve both the quality and the efficiency of their interpretation.