A Study On "Noises" In English-Chinese Consecutive Interpreting And Noise-abating Training From The Perspective Of Communication Theory

This thesis attempts to investigate the noises in consecutive interpreting process from the perspective of communication theory.Interpreting,as a special case of communication,possesses the communicative attributes in nature and follows the same fundamental principles of information flow and message transference as common communication activities do.According to communication theory,the communication process includes basic factors of information source,channel, recipient and noise.The concept "noise" in communication science is a broad sense, referring to all the factors that interfere with the information flow resulting that the information the recipient gets is incomplete or not completely correct.Since consecutive interpreting(CI) is a form of interpreting and also follows the principle of information flow,the noise factor should also exist in the CI process.Thus the thesis is going to build a communication model of CI process with noise as the major concern and examines three specific noises namely psychological,cultural and linguistic noise with a control experiment and with English major junior students who are student interpreting learners as research subject.The research questions are:for English major junior students who are beginners in interpreting,do linguistic,psychological and cultural noises exist in their English-Chinese(E-C) CI process? Which of the three noises has the greatest influence on the students? Can training on specific noise-abating techniques and skills effectively improve the interpreting quality in terms of fidelity?The thesis is divided into six chapters.Chapter One is an introduction of the research orientation,rationale,research questions and research methodology. Chapter Two is a review of what has been explored in this field,namely previous studies on translation from the perspective of communication theory,on interpreting from the view of communication theory,and on interpreting from the view of noise theory.Chapter Three is the theoretical framework introducing first the communication theory and theory on noise.Then it discusses interpreting as a process of communication and builds a communication model of CI with noise as major concern.At last it discusses noises existing in the interpreting process,especially in E-C CI process.Chapter Four introduces the experiment design consisting of research subject,experiment design and procedure,test material,teaching material,data collection,analytical method and pilot test.Chapter Five is an analysis of the results of the experiment and the questionnaire.Chapter Six draws the conclusion from the analysis and discusses the limitations of the research and suggestions on further study in this field.