An Experimental Studv Of The Effects Of Schemata On The Accuracy Of English-Chinese Simultaneous Interpretation

Schema,originally a philosophical and psychological concept,denotes the mental structure of human beings to store the old knowledge and process the incoming information.Since its introduction into interpreting studies,various researches have verified that schema has positive effects on the improvement of the"quality" of simultaneous interpretation(SI).But the relevance of schema with"accuracy" of SI products has been rarely delved into in the previous studies.In this regard,this paper aims to explore the effects of enriched schemata on the accuracy of English-Chinese(E-C)simultaneous interpretation,in order to provide some valuable references to SI learners and reseachers.This study conducted a pair of cross-over experiments in which eight subjects,evenly assigned into two groups based on their interpreting competence,took turns to perform as the experimental group and the control group in interping the two speeches.All of the participants are second-year postgraduates in School of English and International Studies,Beijing Foreign Studies University,majoring in master of translation and interpreting.The only difference is that the day before the experiment the experimental groups received 20 minutes’ training to activate the content and structure schemata concerning the interpreting materials.At the end of interpreting sessions,two groups were asked to fill in two questionnaires about their mastery of the knowledge points in relation to each speech material and to be interviewed one-on-one at the end of the experiment.Inspired by the information unit for quality assessment of interpreting put forward by Cai Xiaohong,the study formulates a set of evaluation mechanism for acuracy and makes comparisons about the transcripts of all the interpretations made by the two groups from two perspectives:the information fidelity and significant errors.The experiment results are expounded through data analyses with references to quesionnaires and interview recordings.Through comparisons,the study finds that the interpretations of the two experimental groups are more accurate than those of the control group,which is embodied by the higher information fidelity as well as fewer significant logical and factual errors of the experimental groups than the control group.Therefore,two conclusions could be drawn:first,a positive correlation does exist between the degree of mastery of content and structure and the information fidelity of the interpretations to the original speeches;and second,there is a negative correlation between the richness of content and structure schemata and the occurrence of significant errors in the interpretations.In addition to this,the study also examines the differences in explicitation,frequency of correct anticipation,and listening comprehension of the two groups.The results all demonstrate that the schema has a positive effect on promoting the accuracy of English-Chinese simultaneous interpretation.The contributions of this thesis are mainly at the empirical level.Focusing on the aspect of accuracy in quality assessment,this paper has confirmed that content and structure schemata could raise the accuracy of the E-C SI products from five perspectives of information fidelity,occurrence of significant errors,explicitation,frequency of correct anticipations and listening comprehension.In addition,this study sets up a feasible and reasonable evaluation system by adapting Cai Xiaohong’division mechanism of the information units to assess the accuracy of the interpreting products from two respects of accuracy and at three layers,which could provide some references for future studies.