Comprehension Barriers In Consecutive Interpreting And The Coping Strategies

With the deepening of globalization, interpretation has become increasinglyimportant and prosperous. During its development, there has been a great deal ofresearch done on interpretation theories and practice. However, researches done onlistening comprehension in interpretation are relatively rare.Listening comprehension in interpretation is different from that in other occasions.On one hand, in interpretation, listening comprehension is more precise andprofessional, interpreters not only need to listen and comprehend the speaker’sutterance but also need to comprehend the inner logic relations, and most importantly,interpreters need to reproduce what has been said in another language as accurately aspossible. Therefore, the process of listening in interpretation is a process of sourcelanguage decoding and a process of target language recoding as well. If any problemsoccur in this phase, the overall quality of interpretation would be hampered.There are five chapters in this paper. In the first chapter, the author first introducesthe previous studies and research results of listening comprehension from threedifferent perspectives, which are the “Schema Theory”, the “Psycholinguistic Theory”and the “Relevance Theory”, and then introduces the “Automaticity Theory”, which isthe theoretic foundation of this thesis.In the second chapter, the author tries to correct a misunderstanding held by thepublic of listening and discusses the comprehension barriers from linguisticperspective, i.e. phonetics, lexicon, semantics and text.In the third chapter, the author explains comprehension barriers in view ofextra-linguistic knowledge, which include subject knowledge, situational knowledge,and cultural knowledge.In the fourth chapter, the author tries to propose some coping strategies based onthe analysis of the mentioned obstacles.In the last chapter, the author summarizes the main findings of this study, points outthe limitations of the current study and gives suggestions for further improvement.