A Study On Strategies Of Syntactic Transfer During English-Chinese Alternating Interpretation From The Perspective Of Image-Schema Theory

As an important part of cognitive linguistics, image-schema theory has gradually become a much-talk-about topic in the field of linguistic studies at home and abroad. People are empowered by image schema to perceive the world. Image-schema enables people to make inferences about the common concept of systems which are based on people’s daily experience. Cognitive linguists think that human languages syntactic structures are also the results of human experience, which can be abstractly organized into specific image-schematic structures and stored as images in the brain. These images play an important role in understanding and making judgment. English and Chinese have different schematic structures due to their different syntactic structures. Therefore, interpreters should bear these images in mind so that they can instantaneously and accurately interpret English into Chinese during alternating interpretation.In this paper, I will analyze the differences between English and Chinese syntactic structures with the method of contrast analysis from the perspective of the linear sequence pattern which is one of the image-schematic structures. English sentences are controlled by their subjects and predicates, which presents a linear order pattern while Chinese sentences don’t have this kind of pattern. Interpreters will naturally establish a linear sequence of English sentences in brains after receiving the source text. During English-Chinese alternating interpretation, interpreter tends to transfer linear sequential pattern of English sentences directly into the target language, which makes target text obscure, blunt and confusing. To overcome this kind of syntactic transfer, interpreters must fully understand the differences of these two languages’schematic structures and master the strategies of English-Chinese alternating interpretation.