Interpreter's Interdisciplinary Awareness And Career Development

This paper is mainly about the impact of interdisciplinary awareness upon the results of interpretation. The writer got the inspiration from Huang Qin's book, Interdisciplinary Analysis of Chinese Translation of English News, and the help from Prof. Li Xin, as well as the experience of many interpretation practices. This paper believes that people who have enough or are able to activate the system of their interdisciplinary awareness during the process interpretation, can produce better interpretations than those who don't have or are not able to activate the same system. However, the capability of activating the system is not the focus of this paper. And through the empirical study of asking 100 schoolmates and colleagues to take a small interpretation test, this paper finds there is a significant impact of interdisciplinary awareness upon the results of interpretations.In Gile's"Effort Model,"he believes that interpreters need to spend some time on searching for the specific subject information in which the source language speech falls after listening. The source language speech is a short-term memory, but the relevant subject information belongs to long-term memory. Only when short-term memory and long-term memory have been securely connected could the interpreter choose the right corresponding expression. And then the interpreter moves on to the next procedure to produce a good and effective interpretation. Since both the time span and brain capacity are highly limited in real circumstances, in spite of possibly high psychological stress, the interpreter will need to finish the connection between short-term memory and long-term memory in the manner of high efficiency and accuracy. And here the interdisciplinary awareness could act as a"long-term memory activator"that flows between the two layers of memories: the superficial short-term memory and the underlying long-term memory.With an established and improving interdisciplinary awareness, one interpreter could use this activator to recall relevant information from deep long-term memories based on short-term memories abstracted from the listening of source language speech. This paper believes that by establishing and improving the interdisciplinary awareness, interpreters could setup a much clearer connections between short-term memories and long-term memories, where the connections used to be vacuum, rare, or even random, and they could eventually develop into the career of professional interpreters.In terms of future career development, interpreters at primary stages shall choose one big category of discipline to follow and cut into depth if interested, which would lead to a specific discipline oriented professional interpreter; or choose to know something of everything, which would lead to all-round professional interpreters. The interdisciplinary awareness this paper mainly talks about is especially designed for all-round professional interpreters who are most likely dealing with interpretations of more than one discipline at one time, while specific discipline oriented professional interpreters are mostly dealing with one or two specific disciplines of in-depth interpretations. Furthermore, when all-round professional interpreters have accumulated enough in-depth knowledge for the disciplines he/she deals with, and specific discipline oriented professional interpreters have caught up with enough in-depth knowledge for more disciplines; both of these two kinds of interpreters would eventually evolve into the"all-round in-depth professional interpreters".