Coherence In Chinese To English Consecutive Interpreting

Interpreting is an important channel of cultural communication,enabling people outside China to understand Chinese culture.In interpreting,coherence plays an indispensable role.Only if the interpreting delivery is coherent can the recipients follow the speaker’s logic and understand his or her main points.But Chinese and English have different language structures and diverge in the approaches of achieving coherence.Chinese is a topic-prominent language with loose structure,while English is a subject-prominent language with strict grammar.So it is challenging to achieve coherence in interpreting Chinese into English.This thesis used a panel discussion about the Chinese dating show “If You are the One” as the material for analysis.Fei Meng,the presenter of the show,attended the panel discussion at Western Sydney University in Australia and shared his experience in the show and views about Chinese culture,especially about Chinese people’s attitudes on relationship and marriage.He is well-known for his humorous style of speech that is full of jokes and one-liners.This colloquial style poses a challenge for the interpreter to maintain Meng’s humor as well as delivering coherently.This thesis is aimed at exploring how the interpreter managed to achieve coherence.The analysis was conducted under the framework of concepts of cohesion and coherence proposed by Halliday and Hasan and Zhuanglin Hu.The analysis divided coherence into explicit coherence and implicit coherence,and used 26 specific examples from the material.According to the major findings,the interpreter mainly adopted reference,substitution,conjunction,ellipsis,lexical cohesion to achieve explicit coherence and to keep the delivery succinct.In terms of implicit coherence,the interpreter also took into account linguistic context,situational context and cultural context,making the delivery easier to understand and avoiding redundancy.