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The Relation Between Linguistic Competence And Interpretiong Competence During Information Processing In Consecutive Interpreting

Posted on:2011-05-25Degree:DoctorType:Dissertation
Country:ChinaCandidate:X SunFull Text:PDF
GTID:1115330332459117Subject:Translation science
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
Ever since conference interpreting embarked on professional development, the relationship between linguistic competence and interpreting competence has always been one of the key issues in the research of interpreting as well as an important benchmark that separates the teaching of interpreting from the teaching of language. Previous researches reflect the relationship mainly from two directions: the research of the interpreting process and the expert-novice comparative study. Researches of the interpreting process from different perspectives have resulted in many processing models of interpreting to describe the complicated psychological mechanism of interpreting process. Expert-novice comparative study, based on a large number of experimental data, has revealed in many ways the difference between professional interpreters and untrained students or non-interpreters when dealing with both offline cognitive tasks and online interpreting tasks. Nevertheless, previous researches did an insufficient job in testifying the relationship between linguistic competence and interpreting competence, lack of a connection between theoretical findings and empirical proof or the control of the linguistic competence variable in comparative studies. Therefore, this paper sets out to testify the difference between linguistic competence and interpreting competence in consecutive interpreting based on the theoretical framework of"Effort Model"in the paradigm of expert-novice comparative study.This paper combines quantitative analysis with qualitative analysis. First, an English test modeling after IELTS is conducted to test the foreign language ability of all testees. By comparing the performance of professional interpreters and untrained students, a baseline has been set to select proper candidates from two groups for further analysis of their interpreting task. Second, the interpreting quality of selected testees has been assessed. Based on information unit - the major quantitative index, a tentative assessment of interpreting quality is formed through three aspects: fidelity of information, accuracy of language use and fluency of expression, each with detailed analytical indices. The result of interpreting quality assessment shows that on the precondition of being at the same level of linguistic competence, there is obvious difference between professional interpreters and untrained students, with the former doing much better than the latter. Third, this research has testified the influence of high information density - one of the"problem triggers"in interpreting on the quality of interpreting. We find that along with the increasing of information density, successful information conveyance declines in both professional interpreters and untrained students, while an obvious gap widens between the two in their interpreting quality.On the basis of"Effort Model", this paper proposes an explanation of the observed difference between professional interpreters and untrained students by stating the difficulty components during consecutive interpreting and the importance of a responsive problem-solving mechanism. Two kinds of difficulties appear in consecutive interpreting: interior ones and exterior ones. Interior difficulties are reflected in the limit of attention resources and the efficiency of attention allocation during the multi-task processing of interpreting. Any occurrence of unbalanced allocation of attention will lead to"cognitive saturation"which finally causes errors. Exterior difficulties feature"problem triggers"in interpreting which arouse further disorder of attention allocation, causing more errors to come. The responsive mechanism is a psychological mechanism activated by interpreters to solve interior and exterior problems. The efficiency of this mechanism may strengthen or diminish interpreting difficulties and exert an influence on interpreting quality at last. This paper points out that the difference between professional interpreters and untrained students lies in the proper use of interpreting skills and strategies to ensure the efficiency of the responsive mechanism. Having received professional interpreting training, professional interpreters work more efficiently with their responsive mechanisms than students.With the variable of linguistic competence tightly controlled, this paper is the first attempt to testify the relationship of linguistic competence and interpreting competence by adopting an expert-novice comparative study. The result proves that linguistic competence is not equal to interpreting competence, and bilingual ability does not ensure qualified interpreting, for the reason that bilingual ability is not sufficient to construct an efficient responsive problem-solving mechanism which features a skilled processing of interpreting. This may provide some empirical reference for the professional training of interpreting in China.
Keywords/Search Tags:consecutive interpreting, information processing, linguistic competence, interpreting competence, Effort Model
PDF Full Text Request
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