Norms of Target-Language Communication in Interpreting: A Descriptive Study Based on the Corpus of CEIPPC

This research explores the actual norms of target-language communication in real-life interpreting. It is a descriptive study through a corpus-based observation on the interpreting product of seven professional interpreters. The interpreting Corpus of CEIPPC is built with the transcripts of video recordings of their Chinese-English interpreting for the annual Chinese Premier Press Conferences in 14 years. Through inter-textual comparative analysis of the source texts and the target texts as well as micro-analysis of the interpreted texts, it is found that there exists a regular pattern in their employment of interpreting strategies, which embodies the actual norms of target-language communication in interpreting. They include: 1) Explicitation of logic relations, 2) specifying information content, 3) explicit expression of utterance meaning, 4) self-monitoring and self-correction, and 5) compression of loose structures and redundancy occurred in the source text. Interpreters are motivated to comply with the norms in order to optimise the communicative effect of their interpretation and to help the audience understand the speaker clearly and in an easy way.