Acknowledgements
I want to express my sincere gratitude to everyone who helped me during mystudy at China Foreign Affairs University.
I want to thank my supervisor Prof. YANG Liu for her patient guidance. Theinspiring ideas she gave me are integral to this thesis.
I want to thank Ms. DUN Chao at Beihang University for giving me theopportunity to teach the sophomore students so that I get to come across the idea formy thesis and finish the experiment with the students.
I want to thank my students for their trust and cooperation. Teaching them as analumnus and appreciating their fiery young spirit kindled even more passion forEnglish and translation within me. I'll be forever grateful for this nurturing experience.
I want to thank my fellow singers at CFAU Choir. Studying as a postgrad isstressful, but singing, performing and hanging out with them kept me in a positivemindset so that I could enjoy every tiny bit of life, good or bad. I'll always hold theselittle brothers and sisters of mine dear in my heart.
Last but not least, I want to thank CFAU and Beihang University for helping megrow into a mature person (audacious as it may sound) and for imparting in me theknowledge from which I'll benefit for the rest of my life.
Translation is where I started. THAT I'll never forget.
Abstract
With the increasing exchange between China and the world at large, theimportance of interpreting is gaining prominence. Figures, which are high ininformation density, often bring great difficulties for interpreters. Interpreting figures,therefore, has become a crucial module in the training of interpreters. It is thussignificant for beginner trainees to do targeted exercises with clear aims in mind, butregretfully, relative research has been scant.
In the form of comparative experiments whose participants are sophomoreEnglish majors, this study seeks to find the part that consumes the largest proportionof efforts from the perspective of Gile's Effort Model. This cognitive study finds thatin figure interpreting, listening and analyzing takes up the most efforts duringinterpretation of both the figures per se and their meanings. Meanwhile, note-takingand memorizing also plays a significant role in the interpretation of what the figuresrepresent. In the production phase, output of the figures doesn't pose great difficultiesfor interpreters. In contrast, if they don't interpret out the numbers, they willexperience disruption in their logic flow which leads to decrease of their performance.
Taking this study as reference, interpreters, especially beginner trainees, and theirtrainers can conduct carefully designed practices to see better performance duringfigure interpreting. Beginner trainees should do more exercises to enhance listeningcomprehension and speed up their response to figures, while strengthening theirabilities for note-taking and short-term memory for non-numeral types of interpretingtasks. By doing so, they can improve their performance and better facilitateinternational communications.
Keywords: figure interpreting, interpreter training, Gile's Effort Model
摘要
当前,随着中国与国际社会交流日益增多,口译在其中扮演的角色也日渐凸显.然而在口译过程中,数字的信息密集度较高,往往给译员带来巨大困难,因此数字口译的训练也成为口译员培养过程中的重中之重.对于刚刚接触口译的新生来讲,如何针对数字口译困难环节进行有的放矢的练习对于其口译学习起着关键作用.
本研究通过对照实验的方式,以初次接触口译的大二英语专业学生为实验对象,以吉尔的精力分配模型为理论基础,从认知过程角度探寻数字口译中各环节精力消耗的程度.发现在数字口译中,无论对于数字本身还是对于数字所代表含义,听力和分析都是精力耗费最多的环节.与此同时,笔记和短时记忆对于译员准确翻译数字所代表的含义也起着重要作用.而在输出环节,数字的转换并不会对译员产生较大困难,译员如果不将数字翻译出来反而会导致逻辑不清,表现下降.
通过这一发现,教师及口译学生可以有针对性地进行口译练习,提高对于听力理解和数字反应速度的训练,同时加强日常口译中笔记和短时记忆能力的训练,从而全方面提高数字口译的能力,进而提升翻译质量,促进国际交流.
关键词:数字口译,口译教学,吉尔精力分配模型
List of Tables
Table 3.1 Example of experiment conditions of Group B ....................................................... 9
Table 3.2 Example of experiment conditions of Group C ..................................................... 10
Table 3.3 Example of experiment conditions of Group D ..................................................... 11
Table 3.4 Summarization of the experiment conditions ........................................................ 12
Table 4.1 Individual results of the first speech ...................................................................... 15
Table 4.2 Performance comparison for the first speech ......................................................... 15
Table 4.3 Individual results of the second speech.................................................................. 16
Table 4.4 Performance comparison for the second speech .................................................... 16
Table 4.5 Individual results of the third speech ..................................................................... 17
Table 4.6 Performance comparison for the third speech ........................................................ 17
Table 4.7 Individual results of the fourth speech ................................................................... 19
Table 4.8 Performance comparison for the fourth speech ..................................................... 19
Table 4.9 Overall performance comparison for the four speeches ........................................ 19
Table 4.10 Comparison of efforts consumed in figure interpreting ....................................... 20
Contents
Chapter 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 1
Chapter 2 Literature Review .................................................................................................... 3
2.1 Figure interpreting ......................................................................................................... 3
2.2 Gile's Effort Model ........................................................................................................ 5
Chapter 3 Experiment Design .................................................................................................. 7
3.1 Participants ..................................................................................................................... 7
3.2 Materials ........................................................................................................................ 7
3.3 Procedure ....................................................................................................................... 8
3.3.1 Experiment design .................................................................................................. 8
3.3.2 Procedure of the experiment ................................................................................. 12
3.4 Data collection and analysis ......................................................................................... 12
Chapter 4 Results and Analysis ............................................................................................. 13
4.1 Results .......................................................................................................................... 13
4.1.1 Results of the first passage .................................................................................... 14
4.1.2 Results of the second passage ............................................................................... 15
4.1.3 Results of the third passage ................................................................................... 16
4.1.4 Results of the fourth passage ................................................................................ 18
4.1.5 Overall results ....................................................................................................... 19
4.2 Analysis........................................................................................................................ 20
Chapter 5 Conclusions ........................................................................................................... 23
Bibliography .......................................................................................................................... 25
Appendix ................................................................................................................................ 26
Chapter 1 Introduction
Along with China's rapid economic growth and its improvement ofcomprehensive power comes its increasing connections with the rest of the world. Inoccasions like foreign trade negotiations and international conferences, interpreters arean indispensable part to ensure smooth communications.
An interpreter must spend huge amounts of time in training and hands-on practiceto be qualified for demanding interpreting tasks. Figure interpreting is widely seen asa daunting part in the interpreting process, and it is crucial that the interpreter is ableto correctly get the figures across to the audience. Due to the importance and hardshipof interpreting figures, various studies have been conducted in these aspects. However,most of them are centered on the characteristics of numbers themselves or thedifferences between the language systems of Chinese and English, with little attentiongiven to the reasons and cognitive processes that caused such difficulties.
The author taught a course called Basics of Interpreting to sophomore Englishmajors at Beihang University as a substitute teacher. The course served as anintroduction of interpreting, and it included a module of figure interpreting. During theteaching process, the author gradually gained interest in the beginner interpretertrainees' abilities of figure interpreting, thus taking the thesis as an opportunity to delveinto the difficulties they face and to seek methods to improve their training accordingly.
The thesis aims at answering the following two research questions:
1. For beginner interpreting trainees, what are the cognitive processes that leadto the difficulties in figure interpreting.
2. How to improve beginner interpreting trainees' abilities of figure interpreting.
To answer the questions, the thesis is divided into the following chapters.
Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction to the study. Chapter 2 offers literature reviewof related studies. The author summarizes important studies on this topic and finds theresearch gap as the basis for research questions. Gile's Effort Model will also beillustrated as the theoretical framework, and the author will explain how to use thismodel in the experiment. Chapter 3 describes experiment design, includingparticipants, materials, procedures and data collection. Chapter 4, as the mostimportant part of the thesis, presents and analyzes the results of the experiment Chapter 5 concludes this thesis' contributions and limitations and discusses possibleresearch directions in the future.
Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.1 Figure interpreting
The difficulties posed by figure interpreting have been frequently pointed out byscholars both at home and abroad. Seleskovitch (1979) proposes that certain kinds ofinformation, such as figures and terminology, cannot be processed immediately by thebrain and therefore are essential contents in interpreters' notetaking. As pointed out byPearl (1993), though notetaking can help reduce the memory load for interpreters andminimize mistakes, it is not a panacea for figure interpreting. Gile (1995) claims thatfigures pose a significant challenge for interpreters in SI. The unpredictable nature offigures not only makes them impossible to anticipate but also overloads interpreters'listening and memory capacity.
Figures carry large amounts of information. According to Fang Shengping (1987),the amount of information carried by numbers are about 20 times that of ordinarysemantic content, which poses huge pressure for interpreters. Bao Gang (2005) pointedout that the low correlation between figures and other semantic information in a speechmakes figures impossible to be anticipated. Moreover, figures are often followed byvaried monetary units, distance units, temperature units, etc., which increases theburden on interpreters' short-term memory, because in addition to the accuratenumeral information, an interpreter also needs to memorize the following units todeliver a complete interpretation that makes sense for the audience. To make thingsworse, when figures with loads of information, low correlations and low redundancyappear, interpreters tend to experience psychological overloading. (Huang 2006)
Figures are hard to predict. When interpreting, interpreters deverbalize the speech,couple the information with background knowledge and transform it into the targetlanguage. The interpreting process features certain degrees of flexibility andpredictability, instead of mere mechanical word-for-word translation. Figures,however, are not innately logical or contextual, and they don't follow grammaticalrules: they are separated from other informational units. (Bao 2005) Therefore, it isimpossible for interpreters to deduce figures from their contexts.
From the perspective of information theory, the more correlation there is betweeninformation in discourses, the more redundancy of information, thus the more flexibility and lower pressure for the interpreters to process the information. On thecontrary, figures are unchangeable. When speakers are making their points, they willelaborate from different perspectives, so the interpreters can make up the missedinformation with common sense or background knowledge to finish the interpreting.Nevertheless, in order to get certain ideas across to the audience, speakers may opt togive multiple figures that are completely different from each other, instead ofreviewing previous ones again and again. Consequently, failure to catch up on certaininformation may result in complete failure of the whole product. (Bao 2005)
In certain occasions like commercial negotiations, figures are of crucialimportance, and failure to interpreter them with accuracy could bring substantialdamage to the meetings and the attendee's financial interest, so interpreters couldeasily lose confidence and momentum after several mistakes are made. Suchpsychological pressure further undermines the quality of interpreting products.
What's more, brains' short-term memory capabilities are limited to 7(±2) unitsof information, so for numbers that don't correlate with each other, 7(±2) is themaximum. (Wang 1995)
In the past, few academic attempts were made to find out about the significanceof influences of cognitive links on figure interpreting. Some analyzed interpretingproducts and tried to identify the reasons behind mistakes in figure interpreting bygoing through the questionnaires distributed to participants. But generally speaking,answers in questionnaires are subject to many factors on the participants' side: theymay fail to have an accurate understanding of the experiment design; thus, they maynot be able to stay faithful to the interpreting process due to self-esteem; they mayeven have forgotten about what happened in their minds by the time they fill out thequestionnaires. Or worse, there may be deficiencies in questionnaire designs. In thiscontext, researchers should opt for carefully planned comparative experiments tosingle out the factors for study. Therefore, this study aims to delve into how much thecognitive process in interpreting influence the products through a series of quantitativeexperiments.
…………由于本文篇幅较长,部分内容省略,详细全文见文末附件
Chapter 5 Conclusions
This empirical study mainly discusses the obstacles arising from theinterpretation of figures, those facing beginner interpreter trainees, in particular.
Based on Gile's Effort Model, the experiment quantified the efforts needed in theprocess of interpretation. The study is done on novice interpreter trainees divided intofour groups that interpret the same four speeches in different conditions. It is foundout that in both the interpretation of figures and their meanings, listening and analyzingtakes up the most efforts, but memory and note-taking also plays a significant role inthe interpretation of meanings. Production, meanwhile, is insignificant in theinterpretation of speeches that contain figures, and the interpretation of figures is infact a very important part to ensure the overall information completeness and fluency.The elimination of interpretation of figure during production even has negative impacton the interpreting performance.
Thus, for interpreting beginners, more exercises should be done to train theirresponse to the figures so that they can have the figures in mind immediately whenthey hear them. In addition, more practice should be arranged on notetaking and shortterm memory for text without figures. By doing these exercises in an intensive manner,the trainees are expected to experience prominent progress in their interpretingperformance in a short time when faced with figures. Thus, the two questions broughtup in the beginning of the thesis are answered.
Nevertheless, this paper is not free from limitations and weaknesses. First, thesample size in the research is limited in that the author only has access to about 30beginner students. With larger groups of participants, the results would be moreaccurate. Second, the efforts spent in interpreting that this paper looked into are onlyused on figure interpreting. But judging from the procedures and results, themethodology has wider applicability in interpreting activities in other occasions. Third,the results would be more credible if the researcher could have the students go throughtargeted exercises and do the same experiment again to test their performance changeafterwards. Fourth, because the course that the author taught is focused on English toChinese interpretation, the experiment doesn't include passages that are translated intoEnglish, so the same conclusions may not apply to C-E figure interpreting.
Last but not least, despite limitations and weaknesses, this paper is expected toprovide empirical evidence to understanding the difficulties in figure interpreting andgive pedagogical inspirations for training of interpreters regarding figure interpreting.Hopefully, more research could be done using this methodology in the future and moreinsights could be made on consumption of efforts in interpreting.
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