The Role Of Background Knowledge In Simultaneous Interpretation-A Schematic View

Schema theory, since firstly proposed in 1932, has passed from psychology, through artificial intelligence, and into language learning. Over the past two decades, quite a number of studies have probed the processes of language learning including both listening and reading comprehension from the perspective of schema theory, and have generated fruitful findings. Inspired by this, the author takes a bold step to make a schematic study of interpretation, or rather, simultaneous interpretation. With enlightenments from Gile's Effort Model, the author steps into two sequential parts of simultaneous interpretation, namely listening comprehension and production, taking the comprehension side as the focus. Comprehension Equation also given by Gile makes it clear that background knowledge is of great necessity to successful comprehension. In this sense, a question naturally arises: what kind of role does background knowledge play in comprehension? Since simultaneous interpretation bears its unique feature of synchrony without any support from notes, schema of background knowledge will be activated to facilitate the understanding, encoding, and retrieval of given messages, helping interpreters edit and organize the processed information, assisting recall of the information from interpreters'permanent memory, and contributing to interpreters'inferential elaboration. Based on the high level of comprehension, the result of production will correspondingly turn out to be successful. To sum up, background knowledge correlates positively with success of interpretation. It is also the author's hope that this study can be of referential value to the current interpretation training programs.