Influence Of Critical Thinking On The Logical Output Of English

It is generally agreed among teachers and learners of interpretation that when interpreters have similar language skills, those stronger than their peers in critical thinking will have more logical output in interpretation. But such an agreement hasn’t yet been proved or disapproved by empirical statistics. So this thesis will carry out an empirical study on the influence of critical thinking on the interpreters’ logical output.This thesis first introduces the background and significance of the study and raises the question of whether critical thinking is positively correlated to the interpreters’ logical output. Then literature on critical thinking and its measurement tools is reviewed. Then, studies on interpretation by international and Chinese scholars and Daniel Gile’s effort model are introduced. This lays the theoretical foundation for the experiment that follows.Before the experiment, it is assumed that in English-Chinese simultaneous interpretation, critical thinking is positively related to the interpreters’ logic output. Then, the thesis introduces the steps of measuring critical thinking and the design and implementation of the simultaneous interpretation experiment. Results are then recorded and analyzed.Through the analysis on the empirical data, this thesis concludes that critical thinking has a significant influence on the interpreters’ logical output. Generally speaking, if interpreters are stronger than their peers in critical thinking, their output is more logical, and thus better in quality; if interpreters are weaker in critical thinking, their output is less logical, thus not better. For interpreters, this means that they must be consciously improve their critical thinking if they want to improve their logical output in simultaneous interpretation.