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Chinese language in simultaneous interpretation
by Emily Her

Introduction

At a conference on interpretation research held in Spain in 2001, I was asked whether the pictorial nature of the Chinese characters offers an advantage to Chinese interpreters. I am glad to have this opportunity to explore the issue and share my thoughts and observations on it. Since the introduction of interpretation training in Asia in the 70's and 80's, Asian teachers and researchers of conference interpretation have absorbed and adopted theories constructed mostly by European scholars. It is time for us to examine some distinctive features of Asian languages such as Chinese, Korean and Japanese, which may call into question the application of those theories developed on the basis of interpretation between Indo-European languages. I will provide some initial conclusions drawn from research on the features of Chinese, as an example, in the hope of generating further discussion and research.

Features and Problems

The following are some prominent differences between Chinese and English that are identified as possible obstacles to interpretation and might confirm or contradict interpretation theories generally accepted, such as models of Seleskovitch1 and Gile2.

Interpretation from Chinese into English

The most noted difference between Chinese and English is between "topic-comment" structure and "subject-predicate" structure. Chinese sentences do not require a grammatical subject if it can be inferred from the context. The interpreter must go beyond the words to make sense of the "comment" and express it in a "subject-predicate" structure. Secondly, since Chinese characters - which are actually words, not letters - are monosyllabic, a Chinese sentence can be spoken relatively faster than an English one. Therefore, when interpreting from Chinese into English brief summaries are often required. These two features of Chinese alone make it necessary for the interpreter to process message very carefully and not to rely just on words. This vindicates Seleskovitch's theory.

In addition, because Chinese verbs do not carry markers (tense, person or number) and Chinese makes no distinction between definite and indefinite articles, the interpreter must add these when rendering a Chinese sentence into English. Furthermore, nominalization is a common Chinese feature that requires some effort in interpretation. Finally, the interpreter must adapt to the difference in modifiers between the two languages because English is generally considered right branching while Chinese is left branching. The long wait that this implies during interpretation creates memory burden on the interpreter. According to Gile's Effort Model, the advantage of easy and accurate comprehension of the source text by the Chinese interpreter is thus offset by attention paid to these specific features in English.

To my knowledge, no research has yet been done on the advantage for interpretation of the pictorial nature of Chinese characters. The result of an informal survey of Chinese interpreters' experiences fails to confirm such an advantage. First, not all Chinese characters are pictorial in nature. Second, since interpretation deals with message in its entirety instead of separate words, visualization of words may not help comprehension or retention of the message. However, the conclusion remains to be validated by formal research.

Interpretation from English into Chinese

An interpreter whose first language is Chinese usually needs to pay more attention to and tends to make more mistakes in the comprehension of English than that of Chinese. The tendency to do a literal word-for-word interpretation appears more frequently, especially for beginners and with speeches of high information-density. The result is often an unnatural Chinese interpretation. A case in point is the abundant use of passive voice, which is normally used only with a negative proposition in Chinese.

Compound-complex sentences, though not very common in speeches, can be a headache once they appear in interpretation. Nevertheless, the "topic-comments" structure (or topic-prominent feature) of Chinese provides a convenient solution. The flexibility of placing "comments" in several possible positions in a sentence, without having to follow a rigid "subject-predicate" structure allows an interpreter to interpret smaller segments of the English speech immediately, and then link them up together in a sensible, logical manner based on the comprehension of the "comments". Thus, the interpreter doesn't have to make an effort to store sentence segments in short-term memory while re-organizing them into a new sentence. Professor Bao Chuan-Yuen gave this example in a recent paper: The interpreter can begin with any of the four segments of the following sentence without changing the meaning of the sentence or affecting the comprehension of it. "San Diego is the last destination / during my trip to California / and I look forward to the opportunity / to talk with you." This flexibility of the "topic-comments" structure of Chinese is particularly helpful in dealing with complicated structure in simultaneous interpretation, reducing stress and enhancing performance.

Conclusion

Many interpretation scholars in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mainland China have carried out research on the problems confronted in interpretation between Chinese and other languages. The accumulated research findings cannot be summarized here, nor can work done by Japanese and Korean researchers be included. However, the results of research into interpretation between non-Indo-European and Indo-European languages to date have confirmed the principles outlined by Seleskovitch's and Gile's models. Further investigation into details, such as cognitive process, is warranted.

1. Seleskovitch, D (1978). Language and cognition. In D. Gerver & H. W. Sinako (eds.), Language Interpretation and Communication, 333-341. New York & London: Plenum Press.
2. Gile, D. (1991). The processing capacity issue in conference interpretation, Meta, 20-2, 15-27.