A Study On Cohesion In Media Chinese-to-English Simultaneous Interpreting

The emergence of modern communications technologies enables news to be transmitted faster across different cultures and languages.In this process,the facilitation of interpreters in broadcast is often required.From the 1930s,media simultaneous interpreting,once performed in radio networks,is now often seen in television programsTaking media interpreting as the main focus,the present study,departing from previous research that focuses too heavily on interpreting quality or strategies,tries to analyze the product of media interpreting,namely the interpreted texts from the perspective of cohesion.The cohesion theory is proposed by Halliday and Hasan(1976).Basically,cohesion can be divided into two broad categories of grammatical and lexical cohesion.Following such a theoretical framework,the present study extracts original and interpreted texts from press conferences broadcasted by CGTN and non-interpreted texts from the British government in the same topic of epidemic prevention and control,with similar word count,and in the formal style.These three types of texts form the comparable and parallel corpus in the paper.This paper aims to deal with two aspects of cohesion in media simultaneous interpreting:possible differences in cohesion that may exist between interpreted and non-interpreted texts and possible shifts in cohesion between original and interpreted texts.Hence,the author selects 24 indices that are relevant to cohesion in the Coh-Metrix 3,0 text analysis tool to compare the cohesion in interpreted and non-interpreted texts.The cohesive markers in the original texts and interpreted texts are also annotated for the discussion of shifts in cohesionThe results show that the incidence of pronouns except for the first-person singular one and lexical cohesion does not distinguish interpreted texts from non-interpreted texts.However,in terms of the incidence of all connectives,there is a significant difference,especially in the use of additive connectives.An exploration into the parallel corpus shows that behind the high frequency of additive connectives in interpreted texts is the addition of the connective "and" in the process of simultaneous interpreting often at the beginning of a sentence.Such phenomenon is attributed to the linguistic differences between Chinese,which is paratactic,and English,which is hypotactic as well as the working mechanism of simultaneous interpreting.Other connectives such as temporal or adversative connectives tend to be retained.In addition,in personal reference and lexical repetition,the most common shift is omission.Future studies can continue to analyze interpreted texts from media interpreting in a larger corpus and pay more attention to the shifts that may appear in collocation in simultaneous interpreting from Chinese to English.