The Operational Norms of Prefabricated Chunks in Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting: A Corpus-based Approach

Abstract

The dissertation offers a descriptive investigation of the operational norms of recurring 4-gram prefabricated chunks (PCs), or lexical bundles of high frequency, produced by institutional interpreters in China. PCs, as part of continuous multi-word units, are claimed to be stored and retrieved as a whole without grammatical analysis, and processed faster than other units of low frequency. Admittedly, interpreters resort to highly recurring PCs labelled as ‘stock phrases’ or ‘formula’. Translational relationships, including equivalence and explicitation, are described between the English interpreted PCs and corresponding translation units in the Chinese source texts. To better understand the operational norms of PCs in interpreting, I illustrate that both equivalent and additive uses of PCs are attributable to improving coherence and cohesion in the interpreter-mediated communication. Also, they help enhance accuracy and homogeneity across the interpreters in that PCs retrieved from a specific corpus represent the normative use rather than the idiosyncratic or stylistic preferences.

The first chapter reviews the theoretical significance of PCs in previous interpreting studies, practice and training. However, few quantitative and qualitative studies have focused on describing PCs in real on-site interpreting. So far, no reduplicated methods have made any systematic classifications of PCs. In chapter 2, the related literature in second language acquisition, psycholinguistics and corpus linguistics underscore that PCs contribute to improving the quality of oral production, i.e. fluency and accuracy. This therefore sheds light on interpreting as an analytical framework. Chapter 3 introduces the taxonomy (Biber et al. 2004) for four discourse functions performed by PCs or lexical bundles. Following that, 224 4-gram PCs of 2726 tokens were retrieved from a parallel, self-compiled 1998-2014 Chinese-English Interpreting Corpus of Premier Press Conferences. Chapter 4 finds that the most used techniques for PCs are literal translation and addition, based on the statistics of the translational mappings, and presents an exemplified analysis on the functional characteristics of PCs in interpreting. Functioning as obligation, prediction and ability, stance PCs mainly filled with modal verbs help interpreters mediate interpersonal relations between the Premier and the audience. Similarly, functioning as greetings, introduction, thanks and announcement, special conversational PCs are usually the pre- sequences in textual make-up to begin the question-and-answer session. Moreover, PCs of discourse organizers partially consisting of subject and predicate serve as cohesive and coherent devices to facilitate receivers’ understanding of the rendition. In relation to such properties as quantity, shape, time or place, referential PCs tend to make the rendition accurate and homogeneous. Finally, chapter 5 discusses the major motivations behind the operational norms for PCs. To overcome memory- and time-related constraints in interpreting, interpreters tend to literally render PCs as effortless, even automatic, production, substituting PCs for lexical units to lengthen coherent and cohesive devices (i.e. and → as well as the), and repetitively adding PCs to a co-text, e.g. to cut a Chinese sentence with one subject and many predicates into independent target sentences. The two norms aim at buying more time to reduce cognitive load in interpreting.