Comprehension Barriers In Interpreting From The Perspective Of Extra-Linguistic Knowledge

Since China's entry into the World Trade Organization, we have witnessed more frequent exchanges in foreign trade, and economic and technological cooperation, which generated a huge demand for high-quality interpreters in every walk of life. Moreover, interpreting, with its variety and high return rate in terms of forms and payment, is attracting more and more English-loving talents to go after it. However, most studies of interpreting are from the perspective of linguistic knowledge, such as vocabulary and grammar, studies on the practical level are more or less fewer. Due to so many cultural factors saturated in interpreting, if the interpreter cannot correctly recognize, understand and handle them, the whole interpreting process may be doomed to fail.The current thesis will focus on one of the important components of interpreting process----comprehension. Comprehension here means understanding the source language message. It is the first stage of interpreting which initiates the whole interpreting act and affects successful reconstruction efforts. Comprehension barriers, triggered by extra-linguistic knowledge, cause difficulties in understanding the source language texts, induce loss of input information and result in failure in reconstruction efforts.Chapter One explains the reasons and structure of this paper, expounding the significance of studying interpreting from the perspective of extra-linguistic knowledge. Chapter Two is literature review which retrospects relevant interpreting theories and interpreting process. Chapter Three highlights comprehension in interpreting and extra-linguistic knowledge and relevant theories. Chapter Four focuses on the comprehension barriers in interpreting from the perspective of subject knowledge, cultural knowledge and situational knowledge and analyzes each cause one by one. Chapter Five proposes tentative suggestions to the problems mentioned in the previous chapter. Chapter Six is the last chapter which concludes the whole paper.