A Study Of The Cognitive Factors Influencing The Expression Correspondence In Novices’C-E Consecutive Interpreting

Interpreting is a multidiscipline which demands much of learners and practitioners. Contrasted with translation, interpreting integrates more disciplines in their theories and practice including cognition, psychology, semiotics and translation, etc. In most universities and colleges, students take initial studies of consecutive interpreting in which much attention is paid to the construction of language competence and performance. As is researched and proved that interpreting is a information process. Learning interpreting does not only involve language acquisition itself. At the initial stage of the learning of interpreting, are students always plagued by memory load pressure, anxiety and lack of schema language and knowledge/Besides, many researchers of translation have proved that learners’mother tongue interfered the acquisition of their second language, especially their translation performance. Whether it interferes interpreting needs to be tested, though the research and discussion is not the major concern of the thesis. Therefore, it is significant to study novices’interpreting expression correspondence failure cognitive reasons from an interdisciplinary perspective.This thesis takes cognitive-load, schema, anxiety factors and linguistics as its theoretical framework. It intends to investigate the cognitive and linguistic factors which cause the improper interpreting of expression correspondence from Chinese into English by conducting an empirical experiment. The influence of language transfer is also included in the analysis, though not as the main part of the discussion. With the data analysis and application of EXCEL, the author has found out the following major factors.1. For interpreting novices, major factors causing expression correspondence failure in C-E consecutive interpreting are anxiety, nervousness, lack of schema, etc.2. All the above-mentioned reasons are manifestations of the negative effect of cognitive reasons when novices can’t cope with them properly. Compared with strong-performance students, weak-performance students are more severely interfered by anxiety, nervousness and lack of schema Under the condition of heavy psychological burden and poorly-organized schema, the influence of negative transfer is easier to emerge and take effect. For those strong-performance students, they also result in expression correspondence failure on those occasions where schema is not well constructed.On the basis of the conclusions, the thesis explores the significance of cognitive factors including cognitive-load theory, schema theory, anxiety factors, etc, as well as their correlation and interaction in the cognitive processing during interpreting. It also identifies the influence of negative transfer in interpretation; though not as obvious as that in translation studies, negative transfer does interfere novices" interpreting.This experiment is conducted with interpreting novices as subjects, thus can offer some implication for the future teaching and training of consecutive interpreting in higher educational institutions.