| Interpreting as a modern profession has established its important status in the international community in its short history. Nowadays, from top-ranking political talks to business negotiations, interpreters' intelligence and effort have become an indispensable part of all the international gatherings. With their talents and special skills, interpreters help people overcome language barriers, dispel their suspicion and serve as a bridge in intercultural communication.But it is really to be regretted that for such an important and challenging profession, the public at large still do not have a clear understanding, and many people who do not possess the necessary aptitudes have also been attracted to the profession. Therefore, to clarify the public misunderstandings and to introduce correct concepts and approaches to interpreting have become an urgent task.Bearing this in mind, the current thesis will focus on one of the important components of interpreting process-comprehension. Comprehension here means understanding the SL message. It is the first stage of interpreting initiating the whole interpreting act and affecting a successful reconstruction effort. Comprehension barriers, both linguistic and extra-linguistic, cause failures in understanding the SL texts. By analyzing the barriers one by one, the present thesis aims to achieve a better comprehension in interpreting process with tentative suggestion on comprehension skills.With this aim as the main thread, the thesis consists of four chapters.In Chapter One, Author first clarifies the definition of interpreting, including Simultaneous Interpreting and Consecutive Interpreting, then analyzes the interpreting process, and then introduces Xiamen University's model of interpreting to define components of comprehension effort and its importance, and finally focuses on comprehension barriers.Chapter Two analyzes comprehension barriers in view of linguistic knowledge. A competent interpreter should have sufficient knowledge of SL in at least the areas of phonetics, lexicon, syntax and semantics, plus a linguistic object-text. Accordingly, barriers from incompetence of language knowledge involve five aspects, namely, phonetic system, lexical system, syntactic system, semantic system and text. In each system, Author selects out main points, which have proved to be the major obstacles to comprehension in interpreting.Chapter Three is devoted to analysis of comprehension barriers in view of extra-linguistic knowledge: subject knowledge, situational knowledge and cultural knowledge. A good knowledge of the subject matter under discussion greatly influences the quality of interpreting for what is intelligently understood can be properly interpreted. The situation is a constellation at a given time and place involving speakers and listeners. The more the interpreter knows about the situation, the better chance to understand the speaker's discourse accurately. Barriers caused as a result of cultural differences may often affect interpreters' understanding. The difference between two cultures demonstrates itself in two dimensions: linguistic cues and non-linguistic cues. How to successfully deal with cultural barriers is a tough job for all professional interpreters.Based on the analysis of the previous three chapters, Chapter Four presents some tentative suggestion on improving the interpreter's comprehension performance through sufficient preparation before interpreting and coping tactics, such as note-taking, changing the Ear-Voice span, reconstructing the segment with the help of the context, and using the expert or boothmate's help. Besides, this chapter also introduces the coping tactics when comprehension failure has occurred, such as less accurate interpreting, explaining or paraphrasing, and reproducing the sound heard in the source-language speech. |
