A Practice Report On Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting With Semantic Compensation Strategies Under Cultural Schema Theory

Intangible cultural heritage is a crystal of Chinese national wisdom for thousands of years,carrying a profound cultural background and holding the essence of traditional culture.Chinese intangible cultural heritage list is comprised of many traditional Chinese musical instruments.While compared with the global spread of western classical music,Chinese traditional folk musical instruments are not inherit successfully,which seems to be forgotten by people in a pretty long time.This thesis focuses on the practice of Chinese-English consecutive interpreting on the three episodes of The Full Oriental Documentary of Shanghai Dragon TV.The three episodes mainly take Chinese national instruments including Jiangnan Sizhu,Gong and Drum,Pudong Pipa as the theme.The publicity interpreting of intangible cultural heritage is not only language transmission,but also a kind of cultural transmission.Different cultures reflect different cultural schemas.Based on cultural schema theory,this thsis explores the whole process of the interpreting practice,adopting specific example analysis as the main method.It is concluded that the main cultural semantic problems are related to obscure culture-loaded words,dense cultural information and multiple sentence structures.Aiming at the above difficulties,this thesis comes up with the corresponding semantic compensation strategies including one-to-one correspondence,cross-correspondence,constructive correspondence,literal translation,free translation,transliteration,reconstruction and amplification.The practice shows that enough preparation under the guidance of cultural schema theory and the adoption of corresponding strategies to activate,adjust,reconstruct the cultural schemas known to the target audience can effectively save time to decode new cultural information and significantly improve the interpreter’s communication quality.It confirms the applicability of the cultural schema theory applied to publicity interpretation.It is hoped that this practice report can serve as a reference and inspiration for the future interpreting practices and research of ethnic musical instrument interpretation,and contribute to the promotion of the treasures of Chinese music culture.