The book aims to investigate the impact of grammatical differences on English-Mandarin Chinese simultaneous interpreting (SI) by drawing upon an empirical study of professional and student interpreters. It focuses on the effects of three English grammatical categories including passives, adverbials and noun phrases and of three Mandarin Chinese grammatical categories including co-verb phrases, noun phrases and topic-prominent clauses on SI between the two languages. For each cat egory, interpretations of instances in which the grammatical structures are the same across the two languages are compared with interpreta tions of instances in which the grammatical structures differ across the two languages in terms of shortcomings in the accuracy of content such as errors, omissions, substitutions and factors affecting appropriate ness of delivery such as grammatical errors, corrections and complete omissions. The results indicate that grammatical differences have a statistically significant impact on the interpreting performance of both professionals and students, although the impact of expertise is also attested through the consistently better performance of professionals than of students. This book also focuses on the implications of this research for inter preting teaching and training by referring to the most suitable inter preting model, the detailed contrastive analysis of Mandarin Chinese and English, and the comprehensive empirical data of both profession als and students. The study significantly enhances the understanding of the impact of linguistic differences between languages on SI between them, and emphasizes that language-related strategies are a necessary part of interpreting teaching and training. It also stresses that apart from the knowledge of contrastive linguistics, a better understanding of the nature of SI (its processes, its features and its challenges), of inter preters’ capacity (memory and physical limitations) and of outcome expectations (interpreters’ communicative role, speaker’s intention and audience’ s response) should also be taken into account in interpreting training and teaching so that students will be able to build profession alism as early as possible. In China, Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Singapore, the UK and the US, increasing number of universities offer interpreting-related pro grammes. This discipline has become a growth area in both MA taught programmes and in Post Graduate research. Short-term vocational training, BA, MA and PhD programmes in translation and interpret ing are being offered more widely and are gaining in popularity. This book is targeted at scholars and students of interpreting, translation, contrastive and comparative linguistics, and Mandarin Chinese. The book could be used for research purposes and could also be used for teaching and training purposes based on primary data collected from an empirical study. The book is based on my PhD thesis entitled The Impact of Grammatical Differences on Mandarin Chinese-English Simultaneous Interpreting and the pursuit of a research like this would never have been possible without the long-term help, support and encouragement from my supervisors, parents, colleagues and friends. It has been a great privilege to work under the supervision of Professor Kirsten Malmkjær who has provided me with knowledgeable guidance, firm support and unceasing encouragement. I am deeply grateful to Kirsten for all the inspiring tutorials and discussions with her, for her constructive suggestions and comments on all the papers and drafts, and for her breadth and depth of knowledge and expertise of translation and interpreting studies, and linguistics.
