Preparation Under The Guidance Of Schema Theory A Practice Report On Escort Interpreting For BASF Project

This report is based on a 10-month BASF Guangdong Verbund project in which the author participated in October 2021.The site of the project is located on Donghai Island in Zhanjiang City,Guangdong Province.The author was hired by Coperion Company,working as the interpreter in this project.To ensure a successful interpreting performance,especially for highly specialized interpreting tasks,targeted preparation before the mssion is particularly important.Comprehensive preparation is the goal that every interpreter needs to pursue and achieve,and how to achieve better preparation remains to be studied.In this paper,the author adopts the quantitative research method,the antithesis and case analysis method,using the recording of her interpretation practice as the corpus,to compare the interpreting performance of the author before and after using schema theory to guide preparation.This paper aims to answer the following four questions:How does the schema theory guide the preparation?Can the preparation with the guidance of schema theory greatly improve the interpreting quality?If can,where does it embody?How schemata are activated in interpreting activities?Based on the analysis of data,it finds that the preparation can be carried out following the classification of schemata.And preparation can effectively reduce the number of pauses,pretermissions,and misinterpretations which are the main factors of interpreting quality.What’s more,it can improve the accuracy of language,fluency of the statement,and effectiveness of communication.According to case analysis,it finds that when an interpreter receives a "trigger"(a phrase or a sentence),relevant linguistic schema,content schema,and occupational quality schema will be activated accordingly.The innovation of this paper is its research method and research object.The author uses quantitative and comparative research methods with escort interpreting as the research object,whereas previous studies have mostly been on consecutive interpreting and have used qualitative research methods.Due to the specialized nature of the corpus and the limited data,future research can be conducted based on other more general fields and collect more data to further explore.