A Corpus-Based Investigation of Extra-Textual, Connective, and Emphasizing Additions in English-Chinese Conference Interpreting

Abstract

Findings from conference interpreting research in the Chinese context have suggested that interpreters barely produce extra-textual additions in rigidly structured press conferences, and that adding connectives and intensifiers is only required to help the English-speaking audience capture the logic embedded in implicit Chinese interclausal relations. Previous research in the Chinese context has tended to draw data almost exclusively from the Chinese Premier's Press Conference interpreting, which features interpreting from Chinese into English. In order to enrich conference interpreting corpora in Asia and to examine additions in the opposite interpreting direction for the same language pair, this study drew on authentic materials of six interpreted press conferences held at the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT). Contrary to previous research, our results showed that conference interpreters exhibited a certain degree of “visibility” through producing extra-textual additions, which is typical of interpreting in various community-based settings. Moreover, the addition of extra connectives and intensifiers that are common in Chinese-to-English interpreting was also identified. It is proposed that the interpreters' production of extra-textual additions is connected with the specific context of the AIT, whereas the connective and emphasizing additions are to a large extent caused by the grammaticalization process wherein particular linguistic devices change into discourse markers to fulfill the communicative needs in both English and Chinese.

Translation directionality and the Inhibitory Control Model: a machine learning approach to an eye-tracking study

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Effects of executive functions on consecutive interpreting for Chinese-Japanese unbalanced bilinguals

“…However, due to limitations in cognitive resources and time constraints in target language output, omissions may occur. This is particularly evident in the alternating interpreting of longer passages, where the likelihood of omissions and even mistranslations is heightened (e.g., Li R. et al, 2022 ; Song and Matsumi, 2022 ; Zhang and Cheung, 2022 ). Consequently, the target language output during consecutive interpreting may not fully reflect a comprehensive understanding of the source language.…”

Interpreter visibility in press conferences: a multimodal conversation analysis of speaker–interpreter interactions

“…Over the past decade, numerous studies utilizing real-world data have confirmed the interpreter's visibility during instances when they were perceived and acknowledged by the communicative participants as effective co-constructors of communication. The majority of these studies centered on the visibility that interpreters themselves initiate, highlighting their active contributions to the discourse in medical (Cirillo, 2012;Zhang and Xu, 2021), legal Vargas-Urpi, 2018, 2019;Pease et al, 2018), educational (Arumí and Vargas-Urpi, 2017;Davitti, 2013), and press conference (Li et al, 2022) settings. On the other hand, only a few studies (Bartłomiejczyk, 2017;Diriker, 2004;Duflou, 2012Duflou, , 2016 have delved into the instances where speakers initiate references to interpreters and/or their output, thereby rendering the interpreters visible.…”

“…Hence, the aim of this study is to re-examine the interpreter's visibility from an under-researched viewpoint of the speaker's references to interpreters and their output, based on consecutive interpreting in press conferences hosted by the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), a Chinese interpreting context that has received limited attention (Li et al, 2022). To achieve this research objective, a multimodal conversation analysis methodology was adopted to analyze the data, encompassing both the verbal and non-verbal dimensions of interpreting.…”