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Article published In:
Babel
Vol. 64:5/6 (2018) ► pp.792–818

Propositional information loss in English-to-Chinese simultaneous conference interpreting

A corpus-based study

| Beijing Foreign Studies University

Simultaneous Interpreting (SI) as a profession has been gaining momentum in China, but little has been researched on Chinese professional conference interpreting on a basis of large quantity of empirical data. This study adopts an information-based SI fidelity assessment approach to probe into the propositional information loss in an SI corpus of seventeen English(B)-Chinese(A) simultaneous interpreters’ interpretations, and through stimulated retrospective interviews of three conference interpreters. Results show that operational constraints (concurrent listening and speaking, time constraint and incremental processing), source language factors (speed, information density, accent, linguistic complexity, technicality, etc) and interpreting direction (B to A), etc, account for typical propositional omission, incompletion or error.

Keywords: English-to-Chinese simultaneous interpreting, corpus, propositional information loss, cognitive resource deficiency, cognitive capability deficiency
Article outline
  • 1.Fidelity assessment in simultaneous interpreting (SI)
    • 1.1Traditional approaches
    • 1.2Information-based assessment
  • 2.Propositional information loss: Corpus data
    • 2.1The corpus
    • 2.2The data
  • 3.Propositional information loss: Causes and mechanisms
    • 3.1Corpus-based quantitative study
      • 3.1.1Annotation of source language variable levels
      • 3.1.2From information loss to variable levels
      • 3.1.3Between-clip analysis
      • 3.1.4Within-clip and within-group analysis
      • 3.1.5From variable levels to information loss
    • 3.2Corpus-based qualitative study
      • 3.2.1Propositional omission
        • (1)Time constraint
        • (2)Processing difficulties
      • 3.2.2Propositional incompletion
        • (1)Processing difficulties
        • (2)Time constraint
      • 3.2.3Propositional error
        • (1)Incomprehension
        • (2)Miscomprehension
  • 4.Findings and discussions
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 22 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.00070.lu
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