The past, present and future of Chinese MA theses in Interpreting Studies: A scientometric survey

Abstract

This paper takes a scientometric approach to examining one of Chinese Interpreting Studies' (CIS) most productive sources of research, MA theses, with the aim of answering the following questions: How has the discipline changed over time? What fields and theories influence it? And what are its most common research themes? The study's comprehensive corpus of nearly 1300 Chinese-language theses addresses a data-based limitation faced by earlier scholars. A range of state-of-the-art statistical techniques have made it possible to detect patterns in CIS that are difficult to tease out by human hand and eye alone. The field has grown rapidly in recent years and is now producing a steady and consistent stream of research: the majority of students in China draw inspiration from theories within Translation Studies, but no particular theories or topics have grown more popular over time. Despite this consistency, CIS remains a complex and dynamic field of academic enquiry.

Doctoral dissertations in Chinese Interpreting Studies: A scientometric survey using topic modeling

“…The data for the present study revealed that 26 of the 32 dissertations (81.3%) were empirical in nature, in comparison with the data-set for MA theses, where the proportion was just under 50% (Xu, 2015). This finding suggests that doctoral researchers are perhaps more inclined or have more time to use a data-driven approach to finding answers to their research questions.…”

“…Incidentally, this range is similar to the use of professionals in MA theses (Xu, 2015). In the papers for which student interpreters (with or without professionals) were recruited, the sample sizes ranged from 8 to 115 (8, 8, 10, 16, 23, 23, 30, 36, 38, 45, 50, 53, 57 and 115).…”

“…Given the modest size of the data-set, the number of topics was set at 10 and that of (Xu, 2015), but is impressive when compared with the figures from Western countries such as Switzerland (3), Spain (12) and Italy (1) (Gile, 2013). !…”

“…However, in the same article Gile also points out that the serious lack of uniformity in test subjects and the difficulty of recruiting competent interpreters are issues that the authors of experimental studies need to be particularly chary of. These issues did indeed prove to be especially problematic in the case of Chinese MA theses (see Xu, 2015), so the author set out to examine whether the same was true of doctoral dissertations.…”

“…The author, title, academic affiliation, publication year, research methods, keywords, theoretical influences and modes of interpreting were identified for each dissertation and entered into an Excel spreadsheet for statistical analysis. Employing the same methodology described at length in earlier studies with MA theses and research papers on CIS (Xu, 2014(Xu, & 2015, the theoretical influences from each dissertation were consolidated into six categories: Cognition, …”