The Influence Of Source Language’s Dependency Distance On The Performance Of Student Interpreters

Based on the Effort Model proposed by Daniel Gile,this experiment is designed to explore the influence of dependency distance on the performance of student interpreters and the tactics used in the process of simultaneous interpreting from English to Chinese with text.The experiment uses combined methods,namely experiment,stimulated recall and interview.The study chooses graduate students majoring in English interpreting as its subjects,using a discourse with three different dependency distance segments as the source language,aiming to study the following problems:(1)What is the influence of source language’s dependency distance on the performance of student interpreters?(2)What are the causes of the impact?(3)What interpreting tactics do the student interpreters use to deal with the impact?The experiment result shows that firstly,the greater the dependency distance is,the lower the accuracy and fluency of the student interpreters present.Secondly,as the dependency distance increases,the cognitive loads of the student interpreters’ “short-term memory” and “listening and analysis” increase,which leads to the decline of interpretation quality.Finally,student interpreters use the tactics of segmentation,ellipsis and generalization to improve the interpreting quality when dealing with sentences with greater dependency distance.The experiment combines the dependency distance with the interpretation performance,which makes up for the lack of study in this field,and promotes the development of interdisciplinary interpretation performance.The shortcomings of the interpretation performance and effective coping tactics used by the student interpreters provide references for the future interpretation practices and teachings.