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Article published In:
Translation and Interpreting Studies
Vol. 14:1 (2019) ► pp.135–158

A corpus-driven analysis of uncertainty and uncertainty management in Chinese premier press conference interpreting

| Zhejiang University City College
| Zhejiang University
| Zhejiang University
This paper examines uncertainty encountered by expert interpreters at Chinese Premier Press Conferences by marking interpreters’ five types of hesitation phenomena and analyzes uncertainty management strategies. Results show (1) self-corrections, repetitions, and reformulations occur less frequently than pauses, indicating expert interpreter’s better control of interpreting fluency; (2) speakers may impact interpreters’ hesitation with segment length positively correlated with interpreters’ pauses, self-correction, and reformulation, and speaking rate explains the variance in the occurrence of filled pauses; (3) pauses occur for retrieving lexical and morphological information, eliminating logical doubt, and explicating cultural connotation; (4) expert interpreters adopt addition and rank shift more than ellipsis, simplification, splitting, and repetition as uncertainty management strategies, showing an emphasis on adequacy, comprehensibility, and acceptability in their output.
Keywords: uncertainty management, expert interpreters, consecutive interpreting, Chinese Premier Press Conference
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Methodology
    • Interpreting corpus
  • Results
    • Occurrence of hesitation phenomena
    • Potential relationships between pauses and interpreters’ uncertainties
      • Pauses for lexical retrieval
      • Pauses for morphological retrieval
      • Pauses for logical doubt
      • Pauses for cultural connotation explicitation
      • Pauses for information processing overload
    • Strategies adopted for uncertainty management
      • Rank shift (lexical)
      • Rank shift (Syntactic)
      • Addition (Morphemic addition)
      • Addition (Semantic explanation)
  • Discussion
    • Findings from quantitative study
    • Qualitative interpretation of the findings
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 5 April 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.00034.she
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