An Experiment Report Of The Effect Of Background Knowledge On The Quality Of E-C CI

The report will apply Gile’s Effort Model and Schema Theory to illustrate theeffect of background knowledge on the quality of English-Chinese consecutiveinterpretation. Supported by the above mentioned theories and based on the previousstudies, the thesis intends to answer the following questions:Q1：Does background knowledge exert a significant effect on the quality ofEnglish-Chinese consecutive interpretation?Q2：If yes, in what ways can background knowledge’s influence on E-C CIquality be reflected?Q3：What are implications for the improvement of interpreting training?The report is based on experimental tests on one group of14interpreting traineeswho are MTI students in Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (GDUFS). Thesubjects are required to consecutively interpret one passage on which they have muchbackground knowledge and the other on which they have little background knowledge.In the experiment, background knowledge is the independent variable and the qualityof consecutive interpretation is taken as the only dependent variable with other factorscontrolled as constants. Some supplementary experiments include a questionnaireresearch and interview research.Both quantitative and qualitative analysis are adopted to analyze the subjects’interpretation performance on the two passages. In quantitative analysis, the authoruses descriptive and inferential statistical analysis to analyze the data from theexperiment. In qualitative analysis, the author uses the questionnaire research, theinterview research, the note-taking research and case study to analyze the secondresearch question.The author draws the following conclusions after analyzing the experimentresults. Firstly, background knowledge exerts a significant effect on the quality ofEnglish-Chinese CI. Secondly, background knowledge’s influence on E-C CI quality can be reflected in these aspects: the understanding of the passage and note-taking.The background knowledge influence extends to the basic meaning perception and thelogic of their interpretation.Therefore, the author aims to conclude the importance of the backgroundknowledge based on the experiment. Last but not least, the author suggests that theuniversity and the interpreter should pay more attention to the background knowledge.