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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:cuhk.edu.hk/oai:cuhk-dr:cuhk_344348 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Contributors | Wang, Yongqiu., Chinese University of Hong Kong Graduate School. Division of Translation. |
| Source Sets | The Chinese University of Hong Kong |
| Language | English, Chinese |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, theses |
| Format | electronic resource, microform, microfiche, 1 online resource (x, 320 leaves : ill.) |
| Rights | Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International” License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) |
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