A Practice Report On Chinese-English Interpreting Of The Documentary Tea Road (Excerpts) From The Perspective Of Cultural Schema Theory

This is a report on the Chinese-English simultaneous interpretation of the excerpts of the documentary Tea Road.This report is divided into five parts.The first two parts cover the background and purpose of the task,and the analysis of the source text like the characteristics of commentary and culture-loaded words.Part three is the description of interpreting process involving pre-,mid-and post-interpreting.In part four,examples are cited to illustrate the typical interpreting problems and solutions in light of the interpreting theory.The characteristics of the tea as an essential part of Chinese culture bring about more challenges of non-equivalence in process of interpreting culture-loaded words,and Cultural Schema Theory is chosen to guide the interpreting.According to Schema Theory,the process of interpreting includes encoding,decoding,re-encoding and production.Cultural schema encoding is the first step to activate the original cultural schema in the brain according to the information provided by the source text and the relevant cultural background knowledge,and then to construct the cultural schema text.The decoding process is to realize the bi-directional communication between the interpreter and the source text through cultural schema matching.The failure of cultural schema decoding may result from the partial overlap,the conflict and the default of cultural schema.The last part of the report is a summary of the simulated interpreting.For the partial overlap of cultural schema,correspondence and literal interpreting can be adopted to activate the existing cultural schema.For cultural schema conflict,paraphrase can help conceptualize comprehensible cultural schema.And for cultural schema default,liberal interpreting and transliteration with annotation can facilitate the cognitive process of new cultural schema.Through the compensation for cultural schema default,the interpreter re-encodes fresh schema,thus achieving effective communication.