Investigating Interpreters in a Chinese-English Interpreting Class: A Corpus-based Study of Linguistic Features

Interpreting is a complex bilingual cognitive processing activity and a special mode of communication. The interpreted language has unique features, reflecting the comprehensive, on-site, transient nature of the interpreting process. The concept of “interpretese” was proposed by Shlesinger in 2008. It was later clarified that the features of interpreted outputs are different from the source texts, non-translated oral texts in the same target language, and the written translations of the same texts (Shlesinger and Ordan, 2012). The term “interpretese” is often used interchangeably with “interpreted language” and “interpreting output”, and its definition and linguistic features have yet to be fully examined. Studies have rarely addressed interpretese in the language pair of Chinese and English, and the few investigations in this area have been conducted on a small scale, with scattered findings. Besides, the potential of learner data in interpreting training is relatively unexploited. This study will investigate the explicitation feature of interpreting learners’ Chinese-to-English interpretese in terms of whether the optional complementiser that is more prevalent in their interpretese than in professionals’ interpretese based on a self-built, monolingual, and unidirectional corpus. First, a database containing interpreting learners’ and professional interpreters’ output is constructed. Second, the study will examine the optional complementiser that in learners’ and professional interpreters’ interpretese and compare the similarities and differences. Third, the factors affecting learners’ output will be explored. It is hoped that by investigating the learners’ interpretese, trainers can gain deep insight into learners’ needs, design customized syllabi, develop pedagogical tools, and revise assessment methods accordingly. From a broader view, the study could help contribute to the understanding of the properties of the constrained spoken discourse and interpreting discourse.