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- Volume 11, Issue, 2009
Interpreting - Volume 11, Issue 2, 2009
Volume 11, Issue 2, 2009
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Perceptions of translating/interpreting in first-century China
Author(s): Rachel Lungpp.: 119–136 (18)More LessThis article analyzes evidence of translating and interpreting activities (indiscriminately referred to as yi (譯), which also denotes translators or interpreters in classical Chinese) in first-century China between the Latter Han (25–220 AD) Chinese administration and non-Han Chinese minority tribes along the then Southwestern frontier (modern Yunnan and Sichuan provinces). The importance of this archival record to the historical study of translation and interpreting is two-fold. First, it contains crucial details pertinent to translating and interpreting activities in China in antiquity. Second, it documents concepts of yi synchronically, as perceived by three main participants in the interpreting events: the emperor, the frontier inspector, and the frontier clerk cum interpreter. The presentation of what they actually wrote, said, and did in the first-century interpreting setting in China, with close reference to standard histories, objectively depicts the meanings of yi as perceived by these figures at the time.
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Survey on sign language interpreting in China
Author(s): Xiao Xiaoyan and Yu Ruilingpp.: 137–163 (27)More LessThough research into sign language interpreting (SLI) has been recognized as an integral part of general translation studies, especially of interpreting studies, SLI is yet to make its way into the consciousness of translation studies researchers on the Chinese mainland. This paper presents data collected from two surveys carried out in China, one of the sign language interpreters and one of the deaf community, covering areas including the interpreters’ professional profiles, the SLI market, professional issues, interpreting difficulties, directionality, quality issues and the role of the interpreter. The paper ends with an analysis of the unique challenges facing the professional development of and research into SLI in China.
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Address form shifts in interpreted Q&A sessions
Author(s): Chia-chien Chang and Michelle Min-chia Wupp.: 164–189 (26)More LessThis paper examines the use of address forms in interpreter-mediated question and answer (Q&A) sessions in international conferences. The address forms analyzed include both the names and the pronouns the questioners used to address the presenters. The data were collected from two conferences held in Taiwan during which Chinese/English simultaneous interpretation were provided. The Q&A pairs were divided into three categories: (1) bilingual/multilingual communication between questioners and presenters who spoke different languages; (2) monolingual communication between questioners and presenters who spoke the same language, (3) English-as-lingua-franca communication between questioners and presenters who spoke different language but chose to use English as a common language. The results show that (1) shifts in address forms occurred most frequently in interpreter-mediated bilingual/multilingual communication, (2) simultaneous interpreters tended to conform to target-culture conventions in their renditions of address forms, even though their decisions were still influenced by the cognitive constraints ubiquitous in the process of simultaneous interpreting.
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Interpreting Cantonese utterance-final particles in bilingual courtroom discourse
Author(s): Ester Leung and John Gibbonspp.: 190–215 (26)More LessThis paper examines an unusual feature of spoken Cantonese — the utterance-final particle — to see how it is deployed and rendered by interpreters in courtroom discourse. The data is based on five rape trials heard in the Hong Kong courtrooms. It is a known fact that different participants in the courtroom construct their version of the truth utilizing different linguistic devices. However, different language systems have different linguistic phenomenon which may be common in one language but non-existent in another. Utterance particle is one of those unique language devices in Cantonese which is not available in English. Court interpreters often find themselves facing the task of maintaining the coherence and modality of all the participants’ languages while interpreting for these different language systems.
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Using Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) to describe the development of coherence in interpreting trainees
Author(s): Gracie Pengpp.: 216–243 (28)More LessMaking global sense has long been seen as one of the most important criteria for judging the success of a given interpretation. For consecutive in particular, special emphasis is placed on the coherence and structure of the rendition. This study addresses the question of how to investigate coherence in interpreting and observe its development in trainees. We propose Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), as a framework for exploring how coherence is realised in interpretations produced by professional as well as trainee interpreters. A corpus of 66 consecutive interpretations, by eight novice and three professional interpreters, of three Chinese and three English speeches, was transcribed, segmented into functional units, and mapped into a tree-like RST description. The analyses and results reveal that novices tend to focus on local cohesion while professionals tend to emphasise the global structure of the discourse. This difference can usefully be addressed in training.
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Assessing source material difficulty for consecutive interpreting: Quantifiable measures and holistic judgment
Author(s): Minhua Liu and Yu-Hsien Chiupp.: 244–266 (23)More LessMotivated by the need for better control of standards of a certification examination for interpreters in Taiwan, this exploratory study aimed at identifying indicators that may be used to predict source material difficulty for consecutive interpreting. A combination of quantifiable measures — readability level, information density and new concept density — was used to examine different aspects of three English source materials. Expert judgment was also used as a more holistic method of judging source material difficulty. The results of these analyses were compared with two groups of student interpreters’ performance on consecutive interpreting of the source materials into Mandarin Chinese. The participants’ assessment of speech difficulty after the interpreting task was also compared with the other measures and the expert judgment. The quantifiable measures all failed statistically in predicting source material difficulty, possibly due to the very small sample size of the materials or to the fact that the materials were very similar in the aspects assessed by these measures. A trend emerged to suggest that information density and sentence length may be potentially useful indicators for predicting source material difficulty. It was also shown that source material difficulty affected the performance of lower-skilled interpreters more than that of higher-skilled interpreters.
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Interpreter training and research in mainland China: Recent developments
Author(s): Wang Binhua and Mu Leipp.: 267–283 (17)More LessAgainst a background of favorable socio-economic conditions and the development of Translation Studies into an autonomous discipline, translation and interpreting programs are mushrooming in mainland China. This article reports on the development of interpreter training and research here in recent years through an overview of different types of training programs, curriculum designs, training models or paradigms, new textbooks and interpreter accreditation tests. Some salient examples of interpreting research in mainland China are also critically reviewed.
Volumes & issues
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Volume 26 (2024)
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Volume 25 (2023)
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Volume 24 (2022)
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Volume 23 (2021)
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Volume 22 (2020)
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Volume 21 (2019)
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Volume 20 (2018)
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Volume 19 (2017)
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Volume 18 (2016)
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Volume 17 (2015)
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Volume 16 (2014)
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Volume 15 (2013)
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Volume 14 (2012)
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Volume 13 (2011)
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Volume 12 (2010)
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Volume 11 (2009)
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Volume 10 (2008)
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Volume 9 (2007)
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Volume 8 (2006)
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Volume 7 (2005)
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Volume 6 (2004)
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Volume 5 (2000)
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Volume 4 (1999)
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Volume 3 (1998)
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Volume 2 (1997)
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Volume 1 (1996)
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The bilingual individual
Author(s): Francois Grosjean
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