Strategies Of Idiom Interpretation In Simultaneous Interpretation

Interpretation, as one of the most significant means of cross-culture communication, gradually developed into a widely accepted profession when economic and cultural communications and interactions are needed. The importance of interpretation is clearly manifested and interpretation exists everywhere.The thesis will mainly use the theories of cultural schemata to illustrate the translatability and interpretation strategies of idioms in E-C simultaneous interpretation. And based on the idiom comprehension and interpretation mechanisms studied by former scholars, the experiments of simultaneous interpretation and translation carried out in this study aims to seek answers to the following research questions:1. Does cultural schemata familiarity affect the simultaneous interpretation performance? And is the effect identical to that in translation experiment?2. What idiom interpretation strategies have been adopted in E-C simultaneous interpretation? Are they similar to those in translation?The methodology adopted in this empirical research through experimental tests on second-grade postgraduates majoring in English from UIBE. Two tasks are designed for these subjects, with cultural schemata familiarity and simultaneous interpretation and translation performance as variables. Through a careful descriptive and qualitative analysis of the experiment results, the following answers are concluded: The familiarity degree of cultural schemata strongly and significantly affects the simultaneous interpretation performance. This effect is specially presented in Category 3 idioms which are considered unfamiliar by the subjects; the basic strategies adopted by the subjects in simultaneous interpretation are A-A method (one by one correspondence), A-B method (indirect correspondence) and A-Zero method (innovation correspondence and interpretation correspondence).The present study also brings some useful suggestions to training in idiom interpretation in English to Chinese simultaneous interpretation. As by-product, this study also testifies Relevance Theory's application to idiom interpretation comprehension by comparing the results of simultaneous interpretation and translation experiments.