An Observaitonal Study On The Relationship Between Background Knowledge Preparation And Naturalness-fluency In Sight Interpreting

The observational study mainly consists of three modes, namely the exploratorymode, the intensive analytical mode and the hypothesis testing mode (Gile，1998：65).This paper mainly adopts the intensive analytical mode by which the observerconducts an intensive study on one phenomenon through the analysis of theobservational data. During this observational study at classes of sight interpreting,19students, who are studying for the MTI degree in Guangxi University for Nationalities,were chosen to be the subjects. In the first observational class of sight interpreting,none of the19students was informed in advance about the theme of this sightinterpreting. They were required to perform sight interpreting immediately after theywent over the speech draft. After the class, the author collected all the voicerecordings and interviewed the students, which was also recorded. Before thesecond class, the19students were informed in advance of the theme of the sightinterpreting task so that they could have enough time to prepare the relatedbackground knowledge. After the second class, the author also collected theirrecordings and interviewed the same group of students. All the recordings from bothclasses were then evaluated by a third party according to a certain standard. On thebasis of the recordings, interviews and the evaluations, this study aims to find out towhat degree background knowledge preparation can influence the naturalness andfluency of the students’ sight interpreting.Through this study, the author finds that, preparation of the backgroundknowledge about a certain topic will, to some extent, influence the naturalness andfluency of the students’ performance in sight interpreting, especially in theirnaturalness of Chinese expressions and terminologies. This observational study is aimed at making students realize the importance to broaden their reading interests andto accumulate background knowledge of various fields. Meanwhile, it is hoped thatthe study will provide some reference to teaching of sight interpreting.