| The concept of schema originated from cognitive psychology. As early as 1932, the famous British psychologist Bartlett has introduced it into the world of research. According to Bartlett, schema refers to"an active organization of past reactions, or of past experiences". When encountered with the new information, people will unconsciously activate their existing schemata and compare the new information with the old one, so as to comprehend the new information successfully. Since its first appearance, the Schema Theory has been applied to psychology, artificial intelligence, and now language acquisition. Especially in the past two decades, many scholars and experts have introduced schema theory into the study of listening comprehension as well as reading comprehension, and have achieved great results in this regard.As a student who focuses on interpreting, the author has been working as a simultaneous interpreter for several conferences. Inspired by the problems happened during the process of interpreting, the author has been trying to do some research to improve the overall performance of interpreting. Since the Schema Theory has achieved some active results in explaining listening comprehension, which is the basic and core part of simultaneous interpreting (SI), the author takes a bold step to introduce the schema theory into the study of simultaneous interpreting. SI is a highly effective, as well as a very complicated bilingual activity with strict time limit. Other than the interpreter for consecutive interpreting, a simultaneous interpreter is supposed to listen and comprehend, while memorizing and interpreting. However, the research on simultaneous interpreting has been mainly concentrating on its history, interpreter training as well as quality assessment. The research on the process of SI has been scarce. What's more, most of the research is based on the empirical studies, while little attention has been given to theoretical studies. Therefore, in this paper, after introducing several influential process models of simultaneous interpreting, the author chooses Daniel Gile's"Effort Model"as the theoretical basis to define the three steps of SI, namely, listening comprehension, short-term memory and production. By analyzing the role of schema in these three steps, the paper reaches the conclusion that schema do plays an active role in SI. For example, in the process of listening comprehension, schema can help to avoid ambiguities and make it possible for the interpreter to predict; in the process of memory, schema plays an active role in retrieving information, improving perception and getting rid of the redundancy; in the process of production, the interpreter can successfully make an acceptable production by activating different types of schemata. It is the author's hope that this paper can help to explain the difficulties and challenges happen in the process of simultaneous interpreting, and provide some suggestions as how to improve the overall performance of interpreting as well.The whole thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter is the introduction part, in which the author introduces the background and significance of the research. The second chapter makes an introduction of the Schema Theory, including its definition, characteristics, and the three different types of schema, namely linguistic schema, cultural schema and textual schema. The third chapter introduces the definition and history of SI. After analyzing the three types of processing modes, the author chooses Daniel Gile's Effort Model as the theoretical basis and divides the whole process of SI into three steps. In the fourth chapter, by applying the Schema Theory into the process of SI, the author analyzes its role in the three steps respectively and makes some suggestions on interpreter training in the end. The fifth chapter is the conclusion part, in which the author makes a retrospective of the whole thesis, concludes the limitations and makes some suggestions for future research in this field. |
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