The effect of political conference interpreting : triangulating cognitive pragmatics, speech corpora, and audience perception

Abstract

Conference interpreting is a form of split-second information transfer from one language to another. Any type of translation or interpreting should evoke an equivalent effect between source and target languages. This thesis demonstrates that equivalence of the pragmatic and emotive effect was not achieved in a case study of political conference interpreting in mainland China. Drawing on tripartite evidence gathered from cognitive pragmatics, speech corpora-based analyses, and authentic audience perception, this thesis investigates the extent of interpreters' faithfulness in a taxing cognitive and restrictive institutional environment.

This research relies on interpreting speech corpora created from Chinese premier press conferences in 2003 to 2007 and 2013 to 2017, comprising 358 Mandarin Chinese-English consecutive interpreting sequences. Two sets of reference corpora were used to model political discourse in native English and dimensions of register variation in two languages. Robin Setton's cognitive-pragmatic model of interpreting was complemented by a discussion of interpreters' meta-linguistic cognition, and two survey instruments were created to solicit listener reaction to the pragmatic and affective qualities in interpreters' output. They were administered to 3780 US residents, with 80 per cent of audio segments being rated by three to six participant listeners. A battery of correlational and convergent analyses based on the triangulated approach were conducted.

Examining the interpreters' default interpretation of first-person plural pronouns reveals the power of salience and entrenchment in shaping interpreters' choices, but more prominently, their preoccupation with conveying the PRC's position in major issues. Both analyses of multidimensional register variation and paralinguistic discriminators between source and target speech showed the interpreting to be formal and professional, but abstract and unstimulating, which was confirmed by real-life survey participants. Predictors of the effect of conference interpreting were identified, i.e. topics of the source speech, registers of the source, interpreters' task construal, and interpreting-inherent challenges.

Conference interpreting, at least as it is currently defined, exerts an equalising effect in that irrespective of source speech variation, the interpreting product is more similar to each other than the source with regard to register and prosodic patterns. This mode of interlingual transfer leads to three features of cognitive processing: a penchant for default interpretation, shallow and incremental processing, and limited retrievability of registers embedded in heritage culture. This thesis rejects views of register as probability or style alone and champions it as a critical determiner of the effect of interpreting. More instrumental in the effect is the very way in which the profession is defined. At the end of this thesis, a fresh definition of conference interpreting is proposed.

Linking the local practice of a group of institutional interpreters exemplifies how cross-cultural communication can be impeded by the negligence in what is meant and what is understood. Interpreters cannot be hamstrung by a monolithic raison d'être that views them as machines. Amidst increased popularity of neural machine translation and inter-cultural dialogue, this work examines how pragmatic and affective meaning can be injected into mediated and cross-cultural communication.