The Role Of Background Knowledge In Simultaneous Interpreting And Practice By Chinese Interpreters

This thesis applies theories in interpreting, communication and psycholinguistics to illustrate the importance of Background Knowledge (BK) in simultaneous interpreting. Supported by a survey among freelance interpreters and translation agencies in mainland China, and based on the above theories, it tries to explore how BK gaining is practiced among practitioners and SI users in China and answer three questions:1. How diversified are the topics that freelance simultaneous interpreters in China encounter?2. What are the most frequently encountered topics for professional simultaneous interpreters and?3. How the gaining of background knowledge is practiced by Chinese professionals and, whether it works well or not?The survey is conducted in the form of a combination of questionnaires sent out with emails, telephone interviews and on-site interviews. Respondents include 34 professional interpreters active in the Chinese freelance market and 24 translation companies which frequently broker simultaneous interpreting tasks. To answer questions 1 and 2 above, respondents are asked to fill in questionnaires (Appendix I and II) or send their record of meetings to the researcher to fill in for them. For question 3, some respondents fill in the form themselves while the information of others are gathered through interviews the researcher then make analysis about the data gathered find implications involved. The analysis give the following answers to the above questions: 1) Simultaneous interpreters in China also face a variety of topics in their professional life. What's more, the more years that an interpreter is in the profession, the more topic areas that he is likely to have encountered; 2) In the simultaneous interpreters'world, there are some topics that are more frequent than others. We've identify a rough list of the most frequent topics among our surveyed interpreters and translation agencies which may be used as a showcase of some of the"hot"topics in recent years; 3) There are still some gaps between the ideal situation and the current reality in terms of the acquisition of BK by interpreters.With the theoretical importance of BK in SI performance and our findings from the survey in the Chinese context, the researcher also proposes some suggestions for the profession of simultaneous interpreting and training institutions.