A Study On Cohesive Devices In Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting

With the rapid development of information technology,China’s high-tech companies have attracted more attention from the international community,which has led to increasing demands in international exchanges and interpreting.The importance of cohesion in interpreting cannot be underestimated as it makes the product of interpreting logical and coherent.The previous interpreting studies on cohesion focus more on the government press conference with less attention paid to the press conference of high-tech companies,and fewer studies conduct both interlingual and intralingual contrast.This study,based on the cohesion theory proposed by Halliday and Hasan,researches the cohesive devices in the source Chinese text(ST),interpreted English text(TT),and comparable English text(ET).The ST and the TT are addressed at the Q&A Sessions of 2019-2021 Huawei Annual Report Press Conferences,and the ET is selected from the Q&A Session of Apple Earnings Calls.In the interlingual contrast,the author studies the shifts of cohesive devices.In the intralingual contrast,the author studies the difference in the use of cohesive devices between the TT and the ET.The study finds that in the interlingual contrast,most of the occurrences of reference,substitution,extension,and lexical cohesion are retained,and most of the occurrences of ellipsis are shifted into overt expressions.Omission is the most frequent shift in the TT.Some shifts,such as adding the subject omitted in the source text,reflect the interpreter’s tendency towards explicitation.In the intralingual contrast,there is significantly more occurrences of verbal ellipsis in the ET than in the TT.In addition to that significant difference,compared with the ET,there are fewer occurrences of reference,ellipsis and conjunction in the TT,but there are more occurrences of repetition in the TT.The differences may be ascribed to language differences,cultural differences,source language shining through and the tendency towards explicitation of the interpreter.The study expands the application of cohesion theory in interpreting studies and sheds light on Chinese-English interpreting.However,though enough for analysis,the size of the text in this study is relatively small,further studies can expand the size of texts.