Exploring Language Specificity as a Variable in Chinese-English Interpreting. A Corpus-Based Investigation

Although structural differences have been reported as one of the problem triggers in Japanese/English and German/English interpreting, the issue of language specificity in Chinese/English interpreting has received virtually no systematic exploration. Based on the bilingual parallel corpus of Chinese-English Interpreting for Premier Press Conferences (CEIPPC), the paper presents a descriptive study into the effect of syntactic asymmetry on Chinese-English (C-E) interpreting and the relevant rendering tactics employed by interpreters. The analysis is focused on how the long and complex attributive modifying structures, which are typically front-loaded in Chinese, are interpreted into English, a language that is characterized by back-loaded modifying structures. It is found in the corpus that over 80% of the long and complex front-loaded attributive modifying structures in Chinese are interpreted into back-loaded structures or a mixture of front and back-loaded structures in English, which means extra cognitive effort of restructuring is required when interpreting between the structurally contrasted language pair. Such a cognitive-taxing effect of restructuring in C-E interpreting is triangulated with findings from a study of the comparable corpus composed of the interpreted English discourse from the corpus of CEIPCC and the original English discourse from the corpus of daily press briefings of the U.S. government. This study may shed new light on the role of language specificity as a factor impacting reproduction in C-E interpreting and implies the necessity of considering it as a variable in the theoretical account of interpreting behaviors, especially those between European and non-European languages that involve wide differences in linguistic structures and cultural conceptualization.