Abstract

This paper describes how scholars in Chinese Interpreting Studies (CIS) interact with each other and form discrete circles of influence. It also discusses what it means to be an influential scholar in the community and the relationship between an author’s choice of research topic and his academic influence. The study examines an all-but-exhaustive collection of 59,303 citations from 1,289 MA theses, 32 doctoral dissertations and 2,909 research papers, combining traditional citation analysis with the newer Social Network Analysis to paint a panorama of CIS. It concludes that the community cannot be broadly divided into Liberal Arts and Empirical Science camps; rather, it comprises several distinct communities with various defining features. The analysis also reveals that the top Western influencers have an array of academic backgrounds and research interests across many different disciplines, whereas their Chinese counterparts are predominantly focused on Interpreting Studies. Last but not least, there is found to be a positive correlation between choosing non-mainstream research topics and having a high level of academic influence in the community.

Highlights

  • The earliest documentary record of interpreting dates back as far as 3000 BCE—the Ancient Egyptians had a hieroglyph for it (Delisle & Woodsworth, 1995)—but it can be assumed reasonably safely that the first interpreters started work as soon as cavemen realized they could not be sure to make themselves understood by neighboring tribes using gestures and signs alone

  • Contrary to the expectation that the field of Chinese Interpreting Studies (CIS) is composed of polarized camps which barely communicate with one another, Fig. 3 suggests rather that its scholars cannot be divided into clearly separable communities

  • The degree distribution of the entire CIS graph follows a scale-free behavior, which implies that several nodes with high In-Degree and Out-Degree scores perform the function of holding the graph together: these nodes are to be found at the center of Fig. 3, those with lower In-Degree and Out-Degree scores being pushed towards the periphery

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Summary

Introduction

The earliest documentary record of interpreting dates back as far as 3000 BCE—the Ancient Egyptians had a hieroglyph for it (Delisle & Woodsworth, 1995)—but it can be assumed reasonably safely that the first interpreters started work as soon as cavemen realized they could not be sure to make themselves understood by neighboring tribes using gestures and signs alone. How to cite this article Xu and Pekelis (2015), A survey of Chinese interpreting studies: who influences who . The first research article on Chinese Interpreting Studies (CIS) archived by CNKI2 was published in the late ’50s (Tang & Zhou, 1958), and since the discipline’s growth has been explosive: a total of over 3,600 scholars have to date produced nearly 3,000 journal articles and conference proceedings, 1,300 MA theses and over 30 dissertations on the subject. Given its rapid evolution and ever-heightening academic status, it is of crucial importance to study the structure of this scientific community. The purpose of the present scientometric survey is to marry the traditional technique of citation analysis with the newer one of Social Network Analysis (SNA) to obtain a fuller picture of the ways in which CIS scholars communicate with each other both formally and informally

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