An Empirical Study On Prefabricated Chunks' Effect On The Quality Of C-E Consecutive Interpreting

Stored in people's mental lexicons,prefabricated chunks can be retrieved whole without grammatical analysis at the time of use during speech production.Hence,they can effectively relieve cognitive pressure and facilitate fluent speech.Several interpreting studies have been done to elucidate that prefabricated chunks can alleviate cognitive load during interpreting process and enhance interpreting quality.But at present,there are few domestic interpreting textbooks introducing prefabricated chunks.Most students have little awareness of them.The very few are taught to memorize them repeatedly for a dreadfully long time.In interpreting teaching,they are in an inferior status and need far more attention.Viewing this,with the support of Gile's Effort Model and Wray's dual-processing system,the present study intends to verify prefabricated chunks' positive effect on interpreting quality through empirical research.Besides,a prefabricated chunks training guided by Schema Theory is designed in an attempt to explore a potentially better way of teaching and accumulating prefabricated chunks.The present study will testify whether it can effectively help interpreters efficiently internalize prefabricated chunks.Twelve third-year postgraduate students majoring in English interpretation are invited to take part in the experiment.They are asked to take two tests,consecutively interpreting two materials on the same topic(city sightseeing)and of the same difficulty level.The only difference is that before the second test,they will have a prefabricated chunks training guided by Schema Theory.In addition,a semi-structured interview will be conducted after the second test is finished.The paper will compare participants' interpreting quality before and after the training to analyze prefabricated chunks' effect,with their interview feedbacks taken into account.It will also investigate whether this training is effective or not.The result shows that: 1)The chunk training directed by Schema Theory can efficaciously increase participants' ratio of correct uses of chunks,in other words,they can get a good command of chunks within a short time through this training.2)Prefabricated chunks exert a positive influence on all dimensions of interpreting quality,including fluency,information completeness,grammatical accuracy and naturalness,while the degrees of influence on each are diverse.3)Because of the low difficulty level of experiment materials,chunks' relieving effect isn't obvious.The present study's found provides certain implications and enlightenment for chunk training in interpreting field.