The Application Of Schema Theory In Chinese-English Simultaneous Interpretation For Culture Lectures

In simultaneous interpretation (SI), the interpreter renders the message in the target-language as quickly as he or she can from the source language, while the source-language speaker continuously speaks. During the SI for Chinese culture lectures, the interpreter is challenged by the invisible obstacles posed by the vivid and culture-specific language. Given the characteristics of SI, it’s even a bigger headache for simultaneous interpreter that these verbal hurdles need to be crossed almost simultaneously in a tactfully and idiomatic way to get the cultural message across to the foreign audience. Schema theory regards knowledge as an elaborate network of abstract mental schemata which help people to understand the world. Translation is exactly a process of schema transformation from the source language to the target language.In lectures of Chinese cultures, schemata of the source language are often missing in the mind of foreign audience. Such "schema defaults" expect interpreters to be equipped with practical compensation strategies to deliver effective and lucid simultaneous interpretation for targeted audience. This study takes two lectures from the program Lecture Room as the object, analyzes three types of schema defaults including linguistic default, content default and cultural default, and comes up with effective translation strategies to compensate these defaults, such as transliteration with explanation, liberal interpretation, and sense-conveyance substitution. The author hopes that this study can contribute to high quality simultaneous interpretation for culture lectures as well as the practice and teaching of simultaneous interpretation as a whole.