University of Macau / Faculty of Arts and Humanities. / Department of English

University of Macau / Faculty of Arts and Humanities. / Department of English

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 155-163). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Five experiments are presented in this thesis. They investigate the impact of the interpreter's language exposure on the interpreter's fluency in simultaneous interpreting. The measurement of the interpreter's fluency involves a quantitative procedure developed by Kirsner and his colleagues (2002). The procedure is based on computer-assisted analyses of pause and speech segment durations and associated variables. The quantitative measures are employed to determine whether or not different levels of the language exposure influence fluency in simultaneous interpreting. The impact of the interpreter's language exposure is elaborated upon within the framework of dynamic systems theory. Experiment 1 is a pilot case study investigating the applicability of the methodology developed by Kirsner and his colleagues (2002, 2005) to the research in fluency in simultaneous interpreting. In Experiments 2-5 this methodology is extended to investigate the impact of the participants' language exposure on fluency in simultaneous interpreting involving various language pair combinations. Experiment 2 investigates the interpreter students' exposure to their third working language, Norwegian. It has been found that the participant's fluency in the experimental tasks critically depends on the amount of out-of-classroom language exposure, involving the language exposure to Swedish, a language typologically closely related to Norwegian. Experiment 3 investigates the impact of the interpreter students' language exposure gained during the stay abroad in Germany on their fluency in interpretation from/into German. Significant gains in fluency due to the stay abroad have been found between the groups of participants and their respective controls who studied German at their respective home universities. Experiments 4 and 5 explore the impact of the on-going language exposure to the interpreter's second language in the conditions of discontinuity in practicing simultaneous interpreting. The participants with the language pair combinations Finnish/Swedish (experiment 4) and English/Russian (experiment 5) have discontinued practicing simultaneous interpreting, yet enjoy a continuous exposure to their working languages. The participants have exhibited superior fluency measures compared to their respective controls (beginner and advanced students), and inferior fluency measures compared to the control group of professional interpreters. Data analysis of all the participants under all experimental conditions have not yielded any pause duration distributions specific to simultaneous interpreting.

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Keywords. Simultaneous Interpreting; Compression; Strategy; Chinese (Cantonese)-English / Studying compression has both theoretical and practical implications for quality assessment in interpreting, interpreter training and interpreting practice. It could also provide us with concrete and palpable signs of the interpreting process. The findings of the study may also be applied to other language pairs, to the translation of subtitles, and to sign language interpreting. The research provides us with a new perspective to the objective assessment of some phenomena in SI, such as omissions, substitutions, deletions and simplifications. / The aim of this thesis is to investigate the use of compression strategy in simultaneous interpreting (SI) with reference to the language combination of Chinese (Cantonese) and English. The study uses concepts in linguistics, such as the Economy Principle, pragmatics, such as the Cooperative Principle and translation theories, such as Chernov's (1987/2004) categories of compression, Levy's (1967) MiniMax Principle, Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS), Skopos Theory, and "the Theory of Sense." The thesis addresses the following questions: (1) To what extent professional simultaneous interpreters resort to compression as a strategy in Chinese and English SI? (2) Is compression intrinsic to the process of SI and universal for all language combinations? If so, are Chernov's categories of compression applicable to Chinese and English SI? (3) What are the causes and factors of compression in SI? How factors such as contexts and situations, textual inferences and syntactic differences in the two language systems affect interpreters' use of compression as a strategy in SI? / The study concludes that interpreters use compression as a linguistic coping strategy to match with the speakers' delivery speed in the specific discourse environments and contexts of SI under temporal constraints. Compression is also a "labour-saving device" to cope with the cognitive load in the extreme conditions by simultaneous interpreters. It is also a stylistic device to achieve brevity and clarity for the target text, and an effective communicative device to realize the communicative act which benefits the addressees. Compression is found to be intrinsic to the process of SI which could be argued as a universal phenomenon and a universal strategy for all language combinations. / This research uses the quantitative and qualitative methods. It adopts a corpus-based approach, embracing discourse analysis, DTS, participant observation and simple statistics. This is achieved through compiling a parallel corpus of the performance of professional simultaneous interpreters in three meetings of Hong Kong Legislative Council (LegCo) in which the renderings are made from Cantonese into English, i.e. from A Language to B Language. It is found that compression occurs in 60% of the whole discourse in all the three meetings and compressions are used mainly as a linguistic coping strategy in specific situations and temporal constraints due to linguistic redundancy in human languages and specific characteristics of the spoken language. All of Chernov's categories of compression are found in Chinese (Cantonese) and English SI, such as syllabic compression, lexical compression, syntactic compression, semantic compression and situational compression. Pragmatic compression is also found in the data. The main factors of compression are linguistic redundancy of languages, specific characteristics of the spoken language, speech contexts and situations, different syntactic structures of Chinese and English, and interpreters' manipulation with delivery speed under stringent temporal constraints in the process of SI. Professional skills and experiences of individual interpreters and their delivery speed have also affected their use of compression in SI. / Wang, Yongqiu. / Adviser: Chan Sin-wai. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: 2019. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 303-320). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2005. / Supervisor: Diane Schallert. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

M.A. (Applied Linguistics) / Much research has focused on general strategy use during simultaneous interpreting (SI), while little research has been conducted on how interpreters’ choice of strategies relates to source text (ST) delivery speed (DS). Hence, it is unclear whether interpreters use the same strategies when confronted with fast speech, average speech, and slow speech; or, whether they use different strategies under these three conditions. This research argues that interpreters use specific strategies to cope with the different ST delivery speed during simultaneous interpreting within the Pan-African Parliament (PAP). The PAP consists of delegates from African countries with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. In order to facilitate communication in this multilingual setting, the PAP has adopted six official working languages. However, the latter still do not resolve institutional communication barriers; hence the need for such services as simultaneous interpreting. The PAP is situated in Midrand, South Africa, and plays an important role in African politics. It offers SI in English and French. Nevertheless, no previous studies on simultaneous interpreting have been conducted at the PAP. Thus, through empirical research based on primary data consisting of recordings of simultaneous interpreting in French and English at the PAP, this study examines interpreters’ use of strategies. The main focus of the study is the strategies for fast, average, and slow delivery speed identified by Gile (1995), during actual interpreting at the PAP The study categorises these interpreting strategies into meaning-based (lexical dissimilarity) or form-based (lexical similarity) and indicates those that are more appropriate for each DS during SI. By differentiating the various strategies used by interpreters to deal with all three ST delivery speeds, this study creates an awareness about and clarifies how certain interpreting conditions, such as speed, affect interpreters’ coping tactics. In particular, the study demonstrates that the faster the speed, the more form-based (FB) the strategies will be; and, the slower the speed, the more interpreters will resort to meaning-based (MB) strategies. Ultimately, the study demonstrates that strategies that lead to meaning-based interpreting are more successful than the others which lead to a form-based interpreting.

Šárka Timarová: Pracovní paměť v konferenčním simultánním tlumočení disertační práce Abstrakt Tato disertační práce se zaměřuje na otázku zapojení pracovní paměti v procesu konferenčního tlumočení. Pracovní paměť je pro simultánní tlumočení považována za klíčový kognitivní mechanismus, ale toto tvrzení zatím nebylo významně empiricky podloženo. Předkládaná studie vychází z teoretické literatury jak v oblasti tlumočení, tak v oblasti kognitivní psychologie. Analýza publikovaných empirických prací ukázala několik mezer v současném bádání, a to především skutečnost, že výzkum se dosud soustředil pouze na některé funkce pracovní paměti (především funkce paměťové) a na testování osob bez tlumočnické praxe či s praxí omezenou (studenti tlumočení). Předkládaná studie pojímá pracovní paměť šířeji se zvláštním zřetelem k funkcím řídícím, které úzce souvisejí s pozorností, a dále se zaměřuje výlučně na profesionální tlumočníky. Podstatou studie je srovnání výkonu tlumočníků v testech pracovní paměti a při simultánním tlumočení. Výsledky ukazují, že a) existuje vztah mezi pracovní pamětí tlumočníků a simultánním tlumočením, b) tento vztah se týká především funkcí řídících; u funkcí paměťových se žádný zásadní vztah neprokázal, c) některé funkce pracovní paměti se rozvíjejí spolu s tlumočnickou praxí, a d) vztah...