Chinese-English Interpreting Research Articles

Simplification for Efficiency: Development of Schema-Based Chinese-English Interpretation Training Programs

Due to the development of international trade and intercultural communication, interpretation is widely used as a necessary tool in some business occasions. The high demand for Chinese-English interpretation has also increased accordingly in recent years. Interpretation research has been built on the basis of multidisciplinary research, involving linguistics, psychology and sociology. The purpose of this study is to explore the effect of the application of schema theory in teaching C-E interpretation. This study provides some evidence and interpreting examples of application of schema theory in terms of language schemas, formal schemas, and content schemas, as well as a three-stage workshop, namely preparation, training programs, and post-training enhancement, so as to shed light on some practical implications for interpreters, teachers and students. Effectively implementing of schema theory in C-E interpretation not only promotes oral output accuracy through words and information parsing, but also restructure information into an easier-perceived format, to solve the problem of vague oral expression. Therefore it is necessary for interpreters to clarify the content and characteristics of schema theory, receive systematic training, and proactively establish as well as activate as many schemas as possible to improve the efficiency and quality of C-E interpretation.

Differential Analysis of Stylistic Features in Chinese-English Interpretation Based on Natural Language Processing

Abstract In this paper, after researching the natural language processing model, we use the knowledge representation technology to construct a knowledge base and use the sequence comparison algorithm to compare the sequences of Chinese and English translations, analyze the similarities and differences between the two sequences, and analyze the entropy of information between English and Chinese translations through the probabilistic theory and mathematical statistics method. On this basis, we analyze the differences between Chinese and English translations in terms of lexical dimension, syntactic dimension and articulation dimension and explore the differences in lexical richness and thematic concentration between Chinese and English based on “entropy”. The results show that Chinese is significantly higher than English translations in terms of language output length, sentence complexity, subordinate structure and phrase structure (p<0.001), and Chinese is significantly higher than English translations in terms of articulation (p<0.05). This paper provides an important reference value for studying the differences in stylistic features in Chinese-English translation.

Non-fluency and language-pair specificity in Chinese-English consecutive interpreting: A corpus-driven study

Language-pair specificity, which refers to linguistic and cultural differences between the language pair, has been hypothesized as one of the variables shaping the interpreting performance and product. The current study adopts a corpus-driven paralinguistic approach to testifying the language-pair specificity hypothesis. The corpus is a bilingual parallel corpus of Chinese-English Interpreting for Premier Press Conferences, which consists of 200,000 words/characters in total. The original and interpreted discourses are aligned at the sentential level and annotated at linguistic, paralinguistic, and extra-linguistic levels. The paralinguistic analysis focuses on non-fluency, specifically the different types of pauses and self-repairs. It is found that a majority of non-fluencies in the interpreted utterances are syntax-driven, which means that most of the pauses and self-repairs in Chinese-English interpreting are related to syntactical structures in the original speeches. The finding implies that language-pair specificity should be considered an important variable in research and training of interpreting between syntactically-contrastive languages.

Neural-based automatic scoring model for Chinese-English interpretation with a multi-indicator assessment

Manual evaluation could be time-consuming, unreliable and unreproducible in Chinese-English interpretation. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an automatic scoring system. This paper proposes an accurate automatic scoring model for Chinese-English interpretation via a multi-indicator assessment. From the three dimensions (i.e. keywords, content, and grammar) of the scoring rubrics, three improved attention-based BiLSTM neural models are proposed to learn the text of the transcribed responses. In the feature vectorisation stage, the pre-training model Bert is utilised to vectorise the keywords and content, and a random initialisation is used for the grammar. In addition, the fluency is also taken into account based on the speech speed. The overall holistic score is obtained by fusing the four scores using the random forest regressor. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scoring method is effective and can perform as good as the manual scoring.

An English Teaching Ability Assessment Method Based on Fuzzy Mean-Shift Clustering

This paper presents an in-depth study and analysis of the assessment of English teaching ability using the algorithm of fuzzy mean-shift clustering. The paper proposes an automatic scoring model for Chinese-English sentence-level interpretation based on semantic scoring. The automatic scoring model calculates candidates’ Chinese-English sentence interpretation scores by fusing the feature parameters at both the phonological and content levels. Adaptive weights are introduced to fuse the current pixel and the neighborhood mean with adaptive weighting, and the weighted entropy constraint term is embedded in the clustering objective function to solve the selection problem of the weighting parameters. Finally, the graphical fuzzy division information of the neighboring pixels is used to construct the local spatial information constraint term of the current pixel, and the graphical fuzzy division term of the current pixel is adjusted to correct the clustering center obtained from the iteration. Fluency is selected as the feature scoring parameter at the speech level, and the automatic scoring model directly scores the fluency features of the candidates’ recordings; two feature scoring parameters, keywords, and sentence semantics are selected at the content level, and the content features are scored after converting the candidates’ recordings to text by manual conversion. The zero-energy product method is used to extract speech features to calculate fluency feature scores; the semantic scoring model introduced in this paper is used to calculate keyword and sentence semantic feature scores; finally, the random forest algorithm is used to fuse the above three feature scoring parameters to obtain the total quality score of Chinese-English interpretation. Considering the correlation of neighborhood pixel affiliation, the KL scatter and affiliation space information is used to supervise the current pixel affiliation, to further improve the segmentation accuracy of the algorithm; finally, segmentation tests are conducted on synthetic images, medical images, and remote sensing images. The results show that the proposed algorithm has a stronger noise suppression ability and can obtain more satisfactory segmentation results than other robust fuzzy clustering algorithms.

Book review: Chinese-English Interpreting and Intercultural Communication

Book review: Chinese-English Interpreting and Intercultural Communication

A Case Study on the Impact of Mother-Tongue Negative Transfer on Chinese-English Interpretation

Interpreting is not only a simple conversion of language, but also a cross-cultural activity which aims to resolve language barriers and cultural contradictions in communication. How to avoid the interference of mother tongue becomes a focus of interpreting studies. This paper is a case study on the impact of negative transfer of mother-tongue on C-E (Chinese to English) interpreting. Twenty graduates from interpreting majors of Sichuan University were chosen to take a test of C-E interpreting full of Chinese features. Test results show that there are different degrees of negative transfer of mother-tongue in C-E interpreting, which have some negative impact on cross-culture communication. By studying the different types of negative transfer in the test results, some suggestions are given on how to reduce the impact of the negative transfer of mother-tongue from a broader view. We have every reason to believe that as more and more people consciously avoid the negative transfer of mother tongue in their C-E interpreting practices, they will greatly improve their interpreting quality and achieve successful cross-cultural communication.

Foreign Language Anxiety and Student Interpreters’ Learning Outcomes: Implications for the Theory and Measurement of Interpretation Learning Anxiety

Although anxiety has been documented as an important variable in both interpretation performance and second language acquisition, there has been virtually no research on the interconnections between the anxiety reactions induced by these two cross-linguistic / cultural endeavors. A review of the literature on anxiety and interpretation performance finds that most of the existing studies have treated the anxiety induced by interpretation as a transfer of other general types of anxieties, such as trait anxiety, without considering the probable role of second language anxiety in interpretation performance. In order to determine the role of foreign language anxiety in 213 Chinese-English interpretation students’ learning outcomes, which were indexed by the participants’ mid-term exam scores and semester grades, this study employed Spielberger’s (1983) Trait Anxiety Inventory to measure the students’ trait anxiety, while utilizing Horwitz, Horwitz et al.’s (1986) Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) to measure the participants’ foreign language anxiety. Results of correlation analyses showed that a) trait anxiety was not related to either mid-term exam scores or semester grades, b) foreign language anxiety was significantly and negatively associated with both outcome measures, c) after controlling for the effect of trait anxiety, the relationship between foreign language anxiety and interpretation learning outcomes remained significant, and d) a vast majority of the FLCAS items had significant and negative associations with both outcome measures. Implications for developing a theory of and a measurement instrument for interpretation learning anxiety are suggested.