Case Study of the Principle of Syntactic Linearity in Chinese-English Interpretation

Taking "Hua Chunying's speech at the Hague Conference on Private International Law in 2023" as an example

Abstract

The importance of language in the development of human society cannot be overstated. The diversity of languages and the urgency of cross-cultural communication have given rise to the work of translation. In today's world, all countries are committed to international exchanges and cooperation in order to seek better development for both sides. Among them, international conferences are one of the effective ways to carry out international exchanges. The differences in the languages of different countries have led to the emergence of the discipline of conference interpreting, which is an important support for cross-cultural communication, and interpreters are the bridge and link for communicating with people of different cultures and languages. Psycholinguistic research on the process of language comprehension shows that people tend to follow the principle of immediacy in their understanding of linguistic input. According to this principle, when we hear or see a word, phrase or sentence, we tend to quickly take into account the specific linguistic context of the moment, extract the representation of the meaning of the linguistic expression from long term memory, recognize its specific reference, and make an immediate interpretation. In this paper, Hua Chunying's speech at the International Symposium on the 130th Anniversary of the Asia-Pacific Week and the Founding of the Hague Conference on Private International Law is selected as an interpretation case, and through observing the translation results of senior interpreters, it is found that the principle of sentence-drivenness has universal applicability in conference interpretation. The detailed analysis of the text case following the principle of sentence-driven interpreting is conducive to guiding the interpreters to pay attention to the application of the principle of sentence-driven interpreting in the future practice, and suggesting them to combine with certain translation skills to improve their interpreting ability continuously.