The Information Processing In Oral Interpretation

Interpreting is an important and challenging profession with a short history. At present, it has established its own status in the international community. By using their intelligence and effort, the interpreters have made great contribution to smooth communication between people who speak different languages. With their talents and techniques, the interpreters help people to overcome language barriers and serve as a bridge in intercultural communication.It is not until 1980s that the research on interpreting was carried out in China. Ever since the reform and opening-up policy, research work on translation and interpreting has gained more and more attention from scholars. The number of published articles concerning translation and interpreting has been increasing quickly. However, the study of translation in China still falls behind that in western countries, and the research on interpreting theories and teaching is still a weak area in translation studies in China. Many of the researches that have been done on interpreting are still experience-oriented, lacking sufficient theoretical support. So theoretical research in this field should be deepened.By combining linguistic techniques and cognitive techniques effectively, one can do his/her interpreting job successfully. The thesis discusses information processing in CI and SI. The purpose of doing such a research is to find out how interpreters allocate their attention in the process of interpretation, so as to process information with high accuracy and efficiency. The writer of this thesis will combine the knowledge of cognitive psychology, schema theory, as well as information theory to work towards an answer to this question.It is the mainstream of modern cognitive psychology to study cognitive process from the information-processing perspective. In information-processing,human beings work as active information processors and probe into the ways in which the information is perceived, encoded, stored, decoded, retrieved and used in various phases.Human information processing system is like a "black box". How information is processed in human mind has aroused the interest of scholars from various fields of study, such as cognitive science, psychology, translatology, etc. Up till now, cognitive psychologists have made great progress in this field. In order to delve into the role of memory in the process of interpretation, it is absolutely essential to draw on contemporary psycholiguistic research on the nature of memory and mental processes.Human information processing system can be divided into the following three subsystems: sensory information system, short-term memory system and long-term memory system. The ability of short-term memory is of vital importance for the interpreter at work.Translation is a complicated process of language transfer and information transmission. From the perspective of information theory, language is the most basic yet the most complicated information system and information carrier. The essence of translation is to transmit the information carried in one language to another language.According to schema theory, which originated from cognitive psychology, there are two ways of comprehension: bottom-up and top-down. In actual practice, both top-down and bottom-up processes operate at every stage of the overall process. Therefore, both models of schema theory are important for the interpreters.Eugene A. Nida applies the fruits of modern communication theory and information theory to translation research, and deems that translation is communication. What's more, he points out that there is about 50% redundant information either in form or in meaning in any language. In the process of interpreting, the interpreters should be good at distinguishing the essential information from redundant information, processing the essential information intime, dividing their attention properly so as to improve the efficiency of interpreting tasks.Based on Gile's Effort Model and Shannon's information theory,...