English And Chinese To Pay The Transfer Of Understanding In The Top-down And Bottom-up Approach Empirical Research

Interpretation has had a long history and it plays a significant role in cross-cultural communication. One of the key processes of interpretation is the comprehension of the source message in which interpreters obtain the intended meaning by hypothesizing and analyzing.The present study focuses on the comprehension process of interpretation and carries out an experiment of consecutive EC interpretation on graduate English majors in School of Foreign Languages and Cultures of Nanjing Normal University. The goal of the study is to certify the theoretic hypothesis that both top-down processing and bottom-up processing take place at the same time during comprehension in interpretation. It is also the task of this study to elaborate the key elements assisting the top-down processing and to summarize the nature of this two processing method.The theoretical foundations of this research are mainly Top-down and Bottom-up Processing Methods, Daniel Gile's Effort Model of Interpretation, Interpretive Theory of the Paris School as well as Schema Theory. The result of the experiment was carefully measured and analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. After ample discussions, the conclusions are drawn: 1. Top-down processing and bottom-up processing interact during the comprehension of interpretation. 2. Top-down approach helps construct meaningful interpretation of the source message and enables interpreters to make inference and assumption whenever necessary. 3. Three dynamic elements function during the operation of top-down processing. They are topic familiarity, context and extra-linguistic knowledge. 4. Bottom-up processing provides the basis for semantic construction and then further, for discourse meaning. 5. Bottom-up processing is analytical and top-down processing is synthetic.