Subjects

Forty-two trainee interpreters are recruited as the subjects of the experiment, who are registered with the simultaneous interpreting module at the time of participating in the experiment. Half of the subjects are from Taiwan (or hereinafter Taiwanese subjects) and the other half from China (or hereinafter Chinese subjects). All but two of the subjects are aged between 20 and 30 at the time of participating in the data collection. Two of the subjects are male, and forty female. In order to preserve the anonymity of the subjects, those from Taiwan are coded and numbered with an initial letter ‘T’, while those from China ‘C’, and the researcher will use the third person singular pronoun ‘she/her/herself’³ when referring to any one of them. Before attending the interpreting programs, 16 of the 42 subjects have had interpreting or translating experience. During the second-stage data collection, one Taiwanese subject (numbered T016) dropped out, and the renditions of a Chinese subject (numbered C009) are missing due to unknown equipment malfunctions. However, the data that have been obtained from these two subjects remain valid and are used in the research. All of the subjects have given their consent to the researcher for using their data for research purposes.

3.3.1.1 The advantages and disadvantages of using trainee interpreters

According to Pöchhacker (2011: 317-18), one of the common challenges for SI interpreting studies is the “relatively small number of conference interpreters with the same language combination and professional background in any given location” and “the reluctance of such practitioners to have their work recorded and analysed for research purposes”, which indeed has been reflected in my discussion in Chapter 2.3.3 about some previous studies of interpreting renditions, which often involve a very limited number of professional interpreters.

3 Note that the choice of the singular pronoun for referring to the subjects has no feminist implications here. It is just because the great majority of the subjects are female.

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It may then follow that the small sample size leads to the failure to generalize findings as there tends to be a “high degree of individual variability in professional performance (ibid:

318)”. Note that the aim of this present study is to observe whether there is an ideological tug of war between hegemony and resistance among the interpreters across the Taiwan Strait, and therefore the study needs to recruit from either side a relatively large and equal number of interpreters who are willing to have their renditions analyzed in order to confirm the existence of such ideological war. Given the lack of funding and professional connections, it would be more feasible and cost-efficient to use trainee interpreters in this study. Also, the location of the study is a key to recruitment of Mandarin interpreters. At present, only a limited number of Chinese people are allowed to study in Taiwan, which makes it not possible to recruit a large number of Chinese trainee interpreters who are studying in Taiwan if the research were to be conducted in Taiwan. Likewise, there seems to be few Taiwanese students studying interpreting in China for the moment. It may be argued that only the interpreting programs offered in English-speaking countries, such as the UK, can attract students from Taiwan and from China at the same time, which is why this study can recruit an equal number of Taiwanese and Chinese trainee interpreters. The use of trainee interpreters may also contribute to the homogeneity of the subjects. Most of the trainee interpreters, after obtaining a bachelor’s degree, enter the interpreting training program in their twenties. Those of similar age should have received similar degree and content of socialization in their host cultures, which might reduce the possibilities of a high degree of individual variability in perceiving the source texts.

The difference between trainee interpreters and professional interpreters, which has been roughly discussed in Chapter 2.3.3.4, mainly involves quality of interpreting. Previous studies show that trainee interpreters may outperform professionals in some aspects, such as working memory (e.g. Kopke & Nespoulous, 2006) or linguistic autonomy in terms of restructuring or reformulation (Setton & Motta, 2007). Although it is widely recognized that accumulated

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experience may be why professional interpreters can give a higher level of performance through different strategies than trainees, Korpal’s study (2012) finds that there is no significant difference between the groups of professionals and trainees in terms of the use of the omission strategy if the speaker’s delivery rate is not taken into consideration, which indicates that trainees may be able to achieve a higher level of accuracy or completeness in their rendition if the source delivery rate is reasonably slow. Therefore, in this present study, all of the source texts used in the SI experiment will be recorded at a reasonably slow rate to reduce the SI difficulties to the trainee subjects.

There are also disadvantages of using trainee interpreters in interpreting studies. One of the major disadvantages is that the results may not be generalized to what would happen to professional interpreters. As mentioned above, accumulated experience may equip professional interpreters with better ability to cope with SI difficulties, and what they utter during an interpreting process, even in a laboratory setting, may be what really takes place in reality. By contrast, trainees may produce immature rendering performance due to lack of experience and interaction with real speakers and/or audience. However, as the aim of this study is to investigate the direct representation of one’s ideology in discourse, trainees, who have not worked in institutional settings, may show their ideology instinctively. Some studies have shown that interpreters who work for certain institutions or agencies tend to show strong institutionalized ideology in their rendition (e.g. Beaton, 2007). Also, the two genuine examples given in Chapter 2.4.4, where Chinese interpreters were defending their One China ideology (intentionally or unintentionally), indicate rendition deviancy caused by strong political ideology. Therefore, it would not be likely to confirm whether ideologies signs of trainees will be stronger or weaker than professional interpreters at the end of this experiment.

Some might wonder whether novice interpreting, in which radical summarising, omission, changes from ST meaning, etc may take place, might result in stronger subject-ideology effects than with professionals. Note that interpreting from Mandarin

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Chinese into English is mainly on a meaning basis. The genuine SI examples produced by professional Mandarin interpreters based in Taiwan (Chang & Schallert, 2007; see also Chapter 2.3.3.3) have demonstrated this principle very clearly. More specifically, three professional Mandarin interpreters rendered the same source text and produced renditions of various lengths. The Mandarin source text selected as the example contains 59 Mandarin characters. While Chang & Schallert’s written translation contains 37 English words, the word counts of the three SI renditions are 47, 27, and 20 English words respectively. (All of the word counts here include punctuation marks.) Generally, these renditions of various lengths are all acceptable, and the length of a rendition is not necessarily correlated with the quality of interpreting. Viezzi (1993) compares the renditions of the same source text interpreted from English into Italian in the consecutive and simultaneous modes in terms of the length, speed, clarity, completeness, etc. and finds simultaneous rendition too wordy as the interpreter tends to render everything heard. Stenzl (1983: 29f) also maintains that completeness should not be achieved “at the cost of clarity and intelligibility”, which is confirmed by Kurz’s study (1993) of user expectations that sense consistency with original message is much more important than completeness of interpretation. It may be likely that renditions of trainees tend to be meaning and summary-based due to the general principle in interpreting from Mandarin into English and due to trainees’ limited experience in coping with SI difficulties. Yet, note that the aim of this study is to observe how ideology is embodied in interpreting rendition. The embodiment of ideology in discourse should be more correlated with choice of words or meaning of sentences than the length of a rendition.