Stylistic Deviation In Sight Interpreting

Interpretation quality studies generally agree that the interpreted language should be faithful not only to the source language,but also to the style of the source language.But previous studies have shown that interpreting can,to a certain extent,change the position of language style on the oral-literate continuum,resulting in a stylistic deviation.At present,the research on stylistic deviation in interpreting is mainly focused on simultaneous and consecutive interpreting,while sight interpreting has received less academic attention in this area.The aim of this thesis is to study stylistic deviation in English-Chinese and Chinese-English sight interpreting,that is,the different degrees of oral or literate deviation in the translation style in relation to the original style during the process of sight interpreting.This paper adopts the methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis and takes eight second-year postgraduate students majoring in English interpretation in the School of Foreign Languages of Nanchang University as research participants.Two English texts and two Chinese texts are selected for the interpreters to do sight interpreting.Based on the studies on stylistic deviation by Shlesinger(1989)and Hong Lei & Wang Binhua(2011),this thesis selects eight related features of orality and literacy that are easy to quantify in both English and Chinese as the criteria to distinguish between oral and literate texts,including four literate features(nominalization,passive voice,subordination and long premodification)and four oral features(first/second-person reference,parenthesis,redundancy,and coordinating conjunction).Through counting the frequency of these eight parameters in the original and the translated texts,the author uses SPSS for comparative analysis and summarizes the stylistic deviation in English-Chinese and Chinese-English sight interpreting respectively in terms of the increase or decrease in frequency and the significance of their changes.Combined with relevant theories,this paper analyzes the causes of stylistic deviation,so as to better help interpretation learners master the rules of sight interpreting.This thesis finds that when the original style is at the two ends of the oral-literate continuum,the sight interpreting shifts the translated style toward the center of the continuum,but not completely to the other end of the continuum.And there are two differences between stylistic deviation in Chinese-English sight interpreting and that in English-Chinese sight interpreting.One is that in Chinese-English sight interpreting,the degree of stylistic deviation is greater for more oral texts than for more literate texts,while in English-Chinese sight interpreting,the degree of stylistic deviation is greater for more literate texts than for more oral texts.The other difference is that for more oral texts,Chinese-English sight interpreting causes a greater degree of stylistic deviation than that caused by English-Chinese sight interpreting,while for more literate texts,English-Chinese sight interpreting causes a greater degree of stylistic deviation than that caused by Chinese-English sight interpreting.The stylistic deviation mentioned above can be explained by the Interpretive Theory and the Effort Model of sight interpreting.Besides,the author also analyzes that the reason why coordinating conjunction,passive voice and subordination always appear more in English source and target texts than in Chinese source and target texts is due to the inherent expressive differences between Chinese and English.This study enriches the research on stylistic deviation in sight interpreting from two translation directions,that is English to Chinese and Chinese to English.The scale of the data has been expanded and the translation direction has been complemented.The research results and related suggestions can provide certain reference and inspiration for students’ training and practice of sight interpreting.