This paper aims to explore the language skills and strategies employed in simultaneous interpertation from Japanese into Chinese, taking into account of various factors of discourse information structure such as contents, structure, method of dissemination, speech markers, sentence strucuture, and syntax.
This paper adopts the territory theory of information proposed in functional grammar to examine both source and target language corpora of a simultaneous interpretation form Japanese into Chinese, explore the processes by which information is conveyed in the two languages, and finally determine whether the manner in which the information is conveyed is consistent with relavant theories.
The examination and analysis show that the information structure in verbal discourse has certain patterns and is composed of three elements, while the information is conveyed according to a modularized system of principles. Moreover, the conveyed information is linked in a coherent manner by using various presentational and linking expressions. This pattern of conveying information during verbal discourse is not only present in Chinese and Japanese, but also manifested in the verbal communication of all other natural languages.
