The Use of English Relative Clauses in Chinese-English Conference Interpreting
HU Kai-ba · Shandong Foreign Language Teaching Journal · 2014
Based on the use of the Chinese-English Conference Interpreting Corpus,this paper investigates the use of English relative clauses in Chinese-English conference interpreting.The results of the investigation show that 1)English relative clauses occur with a high frequency in Chinese-English conference interpreting as a result of the formality of press conference interpreting and the various pragmatic functions of English relative clauses.2) In comparison with the translators of the work report of the Chinese government,the interpreters engaged in Chinese-English conference interpreting are more inclined to render two or more coordinated Chinese sentences and Chinese noun phrases into English relative clauses.The purpose in doing so is to gain extra time for processing the source speech and facilitate the listeners' understanding of the target speech.3) The English relative clauses translated from Chinese relative clauses occur with a lower frequency in Chinese-English conference interpreting than in the translation of the work report of the Chinese government,since the Chinese relative clauses are found to be short and simple in the press conference interpreting,and can be rendered into English prepositional and participle phrases in addition to English relative clauses.However,in the work report of the Chinese government,the Chinese relative clauses,which are long and complicated,tend to be translated into one or more English relative clauses.