Introduction In this chapter, the justifications and motivations for studying explicitation in consecutive interpreting (hereinafter referred to as CI) through a comparison between professional and student interpreters and between interpreting from Chinese 1 to English and from English to Chinese are presented, followed by the research questions and the structure of the volume. 1.1 1.1.1 Justifications and motivations for the present research The rationale for studying explicitation in interpreting The term “explicitation” was first defined by Vinay and Darbelnet (1958/1995: 342) as “a stylistic translation technique which consists of making explicit in the tar get language what remains implicit in the source language because it is apparent from either the context or the situation”. A large number of studies have been car ried out to investigate explicitations in translation. In addition, quite a number of corpus-based translation studies have tried to identify explicitation as one of the Translation Universals. Are these findings also applicable to interpreting? It is known that interpreting is an extraordinarily complex cognitive activity, which requires an interpreter to deal with several tasks in quick succession, including listening to what the speaker says, storing the message in their mind and notes, listening to the speaker’s next segment of message, retrieving the previously stored message, expressing it in another language and monitoring the output. If we take into consideration the heavy cognitive load and time pressure interpreters expe rience while conducting this multitasking job, it seems that it is not easy for in terpreters to make extra effort to explicitate any information. However, previous studies have revealed that explicitation not only exists in interpreting but also is a strategy that interpreters adopt frequently (Niska 1999; Ishikawa 1999; Gumul 2006a, 2006b, 2008; Xue 2007; Zhang 2009; Hu & Tao 2009; Tang & Li 2013, 2016 & 2017). Why do interpreters make extra effort in adding new information while it has already been quite a challenge for them to encode the original message into another language? What kind of explicitations do they perform often? Is there any interpreting-inherent reasons which motivate interpreters’ explicitations? This study investigates the above questions with a view to helping readers reach a clear perception of the features of explicitation in interpreting. 1.1.2 The rationale for limiting this study to consecutive interpreting Previous studies have shown that explicitation exists in both CI and simultane ous interpreting (hereinafter referred to as SI). Also, several studies have already focused on explicitation in SI (Niska 1999; Ishikawa 1999; Gumul 2006a, 2006b, 2008). For explicitation in CI, some studies have been conducted (Xue 2007; Zhang 2009; Hu & Tao 2009). Yet, Xue’s research lacks elaboration on the typology method that she adopted (see Section 2.2.3), and the research scope of the other two studies are rather limited (Zhang’s research only presents a case study, while Hu & Tao only focus on explicitation of textual meaning). Therefore, this particular study attempts to fill in this gap by conducting a systematic study on explicitation in CI. 1.1.3 The rationale for making a comparison between professional and student interpreters Intuitively, as interpreters need to work under a heavy time pressure, it seems rea sonable that less experienced interpreters may tend to render information with fewer shifts because their reaction in information processing is relatively slow. But on the other hand, as interpreters’ aim is usually to facilitate communication, it is also justifiable that more experienced interpreters are more likely to clarify infor mation. This is exactly the finding in Englund Dimitrova’s experiment (2003: 30), which revealed that professional translators tend to explicitate, whereas students tend not to (see Section 2.3 and 2.5).
