| Evaluating the source text difficulty of consecutive interpreting has implications for interpreting tests,teaching,and research.At present,there has yet to be a consensus on factors affecting the source text difficulty of consecutive interpreting.Most relevant studies focus on the influence of information-level factors(e.g.,difficult words,complex sentence patterns,information density).Although the literature provides various accounts of the possible impact of discourse-level factors,it does not provide sufficient empirical base.This study aims to describe the effects of different discourse structures on the source text difficulty of consecutive interpreting and to explore the reasons behind these effects.This study focuses on two types of discourse structures,one featuring "causal"relations and one featuring "additive" relations and examines their different effects on the difficulty of consecutive interpreting.Both experimental and questionnaire methods were employed.The source text’s distribution of discourse units and coherence structures(rhetorical relations)was visualized through the rhetorical relations tools in light of the Rhetorical Structure Theory.The interpretation outputs in the experiment were further analysed by virtue of Gill’s Effort Models to explain the experimental results and the mechanism of discourse structure’s influence on the difficulty of consecutive interpreting.The experimental results indicate that the interpretation difficulty of the discourse structure featuring "causal" relations was lower than that mainly constructed by"additive" relations.Through content analysis of the participants’ interpreting performance,the reason lies in the way interpreters process the two types of coherence relations.Since the "causal" relations connect propositions closely to each other and lead to a high degree of content dependency,it is easy for the interpreter to remember a group of propositions as a whole and use common sense to anticipate information in advance.In contrast,it is difficult for the interpreters to predict in advance in terms of content and structure,which can only be processed in real-time.Therefore,interpreters are subject to a more significant cognitive load.In addition,the content of "additive" relations is weakly related to each other,and there is no fixed order,so interpreters have limited cues to track and remember them.Therefore,the discourse structure built by "causal" relations is easier to process and memorize than that constructed by "additive" relations.The findings of this study can provide a reference for material selection in interpretation teaching and testing,as well as targeted suggestions for enhancing the ability of interpretation learners to grasp the structure of discourse. |
