The Role Of Domain Knowledge In Simultaneous Interpreting

Since interpreting became a profession in the post-war era,modern-day interpreters have rarely been experts of but often outsiders to the domains they are to work in,and hence often have to build an understanding of those domains through a brief learning process.Noticing the interpreter's changing knowledge structure,some researchers mused about potential specialization within the professional community.They set to capture the knowledge profile of their generation's interpreters in an attempt to draw and predict the trajectory of how the professional community's domain knowledge changed overtime and would evolve in future.Other researchers focused on the preparation stage and used laboratory experiments to determine the influence of knowledge on the interpreter's performance.Nevertheless,most specialization studies focused on European languages and came to a halt in the 1990 s.In experiments on the effect of preparation and pre-knowledge,professional interpreters with preparation did not always distinctively outperform those without,indicating that the role of knowledge in complex cognitive activities may differ from what is generally assumed.This study sets out to depict the knowledge profile of Chinese-English interpreters in China's mainland so as to determine whether time or the language combination influences the specialization of the professional community.In addition,the study further specifies the conditions of the preparation experiment.It compares the efficacy of knowledge gathered independently by an interpreter and that of systematic knowledge typical of a domain expert in a simultaneous interpreting assignment.Based on a survey covering 48 subjects and interviews covering 8 subjects,the descriptive part continues the discussion of specialization by exploring the current level of specialization among professionals,their opinions on the role of domain knowledge in interpreting and their knowledge acquisition routines.In the experiment,8 Chinese-English professional interpreters were asked to interpret a clip of an English speech on Periodontics.The 8 subjects were divided into two groups,with one group given access to a set of highly relevant,informative and systematic materials on the subject and the other to research the subject on their own,so as to determine the influence of domain knowledge on simultaneous interpreting.The performance of the subjects were evaluated using the coding system of Barik(1975)and user feedback.In spite of time and the language combination,the study shows considerable consistency in professional interpreters' opinions on the role of domain knowledge in interpreting and their knowledge acquisition routines.Learning skills are widely regarded as a part of an interpreter's domain knowledge,while the professionals differ on its other components and the adequacy of preparation for assignments in different domains.Meanwhile,the study indicates a considerable increase in the level of specialization among Chinese-English interpreters in China's mainland,though the pressure on the professional community to specialize or gain expert-like knowledge in other domains is still rather limited.On the parallel,the study fails to detect any major statistically significant difference between the two experiment groups' performance,but finds a correlation between terminology use and performance.The study also finds that an interpreter's performance may be more influenced by her stage of career development than the assigned domain per se.Overall,the study is a continuation of research into specialization,a more granular development of preparation research and an addition to a small number of existing studies on the interpreting community's domain knowledge.