On The Process Of Comprehension In Consecutive Interpretation

Consecutive interpreting (CI), as a kind of interpretation, plays very important roles in interpretation teaching and on those occasions where accuracy of rendition is preferred. During the process of CI, comprehension is closely related to the quality of interpretation. In this paper, we mainly concentrate on the process of comprehension in CI.The process of comprehension in CI may be considered to start from the moment an interpreter accepts an interpreting task. Through his/her pre-interpretation preparatory work, s/he consciously absorbs a variety of knowledge about the interpreting event. These knowledge acts as stimuli and activates diverse knowledge existing in his/her permanent memory in the form of schema. The schemata help him/her construct psychologically the global structure of the discourse s/he is going to deal with. And this structure influences his/her comprehension of the linguistic signals from the speaker when the actual discourse occurs.Within the structure, the interpreter makes some approximate guesses about the coming discourse. Theoretically, the more knowledge of the context of the communicative event s/he possesses, the closer s/he is to the actual discourse. In a broad sense, we assume this is a kind of top-down language processingHowever, only when s/he presents himself/herself in the interpreting scenario and begins to hear the words uttered by the speaker can we say that s/he genuinely handles the accurate content of the discourse, thus embarking on the process of speech comprehension in the traditional sense. This process is virtually a process during which the interpreter pictures psychologically the local structure of the discourse. It is characterized by a bottom-up processing influenced from time to time by the global structure.Through the involvement of memory mechanism, the interpreter strips of the linguistic wrapping of the constantly incoming linguistic signals from the speaker by processing the language at different levels and taking into consideration various factors. At last, the interpreter arrives at the sense of the discourse. We may say that the interpreter's apprehension of the sense of a discourse is the result of the interaction of top-down and bottom-up language processing.