The Characteristics Of Student Interpreters’ Interpretation Influenced By Chinese Thinking Pattern

Interpreting is a process that switches various languages and different thought patterns. Student interpreters have the potential to be professional interpreters. But, due to little opportunity to make real interpreting and lack of coping tactics, student interpreters are not good at switching thought patterns and using interpreting skills. Therefore, their interpretation reflects the features of Chinese thought patterns. Previously, some researchers have made a research on the characteristics of student interpreters’ interpretation. However, few researchers probe into such characteristics from the perspective of thought patterns, and they seldom make an experiment to find out such characteristics.This is an experiment report, aiming at finding out the characteristics of interpretation made by student interpreters in Chinese-English consecutive interpreting. Ten graduate students majoring in English interpreting in Shaanxi Normal University have been chosen as experiment subjects. The material is a speech made by Bai Yansong in Yale University in 2009. Through recording, transcribing, questionnaires and interviewing, two hypotheses have been put forward. First, influenced by the internal thought pattern, student interpreters’ interpretation reflects the features of Chinese thought pattern. Second, C-E consecutive interpreting made by student interpreters has such characteristics:loss of information, word-for-word interpretation, grammatical mistakes, getting stuck in interpreting and so forth.By analyzing the results of the experiment and questionnaires, two hypotheses have been proved correct. The results are:The interpretation made by student interpreters has such characteristics as image thinking, subjective thinking and experience-oriented thinking, which are also shared by Chinese thought pattern. The thought pattern exerts influence on expression as well. Furthermore, the interpretation made by student interpreters is not always complete, flexible and accurate. Sometimes student interpreters tend to correct their previous interpretation. The reasons that cause such characteristics and the limit of this experiment have been mentioned in Chapter Five. At last, with the guidance of Adaptive Control of Thought (ACT) Theory, some specific methods of learning interpreting have been put forward in order to improve student interpreters’ interpretation and enhance their level of interpreting.