A Practice Report On Simultaneous Interpreting For “Ambassador’s Forum” At ICDS,NDU,PLA From The Perspective Of The Interactive Model In The Schema Theory

From November to December 2019,the author undertook a series of simultaneous interpretating(SI)tasks during the “Ambassador’s Forum” at the International College of Defense Studies of the National Defense University.Among these tasks,this report takes the “Security Situation in Latin America and China-Latin America Cooperation,” which was delivered by the Mexican and Brazilian ambassadors to China,as an example to explain how to improve the quality of SI under the guidance of the Interactive Model in the Schema Theory.Before the SI task,trial interpreting was carried out.After analysis,the Interactive Model in the Schema Theory was found to be able to effectively address the problems in the trial interpreting and therefore was chosen as the theoretical guidance in the SI task.According to the Interactive Model,the processing of input information by human brain can be abstracted into “bottom-up processing” and “top-down processing.” “Bottom-up processing” specifies that new information can only be decoded by activating the linguistic schemata on the phonological,lexical and sentence levels and so on in a hierarchical order.In the “top-down processing,” higher-level content schemata in the brain will provide extra-linguistic information as assistance.Only when the two processes occur interactively and simultaneously can the most effective information processing be achieved.In terms of the above two processes,this report selects the most typical examples for analysis.In the case of the SI practice in this report,the most likely obstacle to language decoding in bottomup processing was the lack of phonological schemata targeted at the speaker’s accent.Therefore,Praat,a software for acoustic analysis and pronunciation assistance,was used to construct individualized phonological schemata with open source video files as analysis materials.During the SI,schemata corresponding to the problematic phonemes were activated to convert them into correct ones,so as to ensure the smoothness of the decoding process.In top-down processing,content schemata constructed before the task played their role mainly from two aspects: First,they facilitated prediction of the upcoming information,improving the flexibility in ear-voice-span(EVS).Second,they helped to eliminate ambiguities caused by grammatical mistakes by the two speakers and grasp what they really wanted to say.Accordingly,this report provides some suggestions for future SI practices.The first one is to anticipate on which level there will be a potential lack of linguistic schemata and make oriented construction.The second one is to get to know about voice analysis software such as Praat for quantitative analysis,so as to construct phonological schemata targeted at different regional variants of English in daily learning and training,and build more individualized ones according to the speakers’ accents after interpreting tasks are received.The third one is to accumulate background knowledge in the form of organic modules to construct content schema,so as to achieve such effects as more flexible adjustment of EVS and rapid elimination of ambiguities.