Evaluating And Reconstructing The Processing Model Of Conference Interpreting-an Interpretive Theory Perspective

It is universally acknowledged that globalization is a prevailing trend. Communicationsbetween West and East and between people from different cultural backgrounds have beenincreasing at an accelerating tempo. As international contacts multiply, the communicationand exchange between people from different part of the world begin to increase. This hasraised the needs for interpreters. Especially, with the increase in the number of internationalconferences, the demand for high-quality conference interpreting is growing.Conference interpreting research (CIR) in the West has long been an independentdiscipline, with a history of more than fifty years. CIR in China has just begun for a decade.Major findings of CIR are often represented in the form of a model, which can be divided intodifferent levels, including anthropological level, socio-professional level, institutional level,interactional level, textual level, cognitive level and neural level. Processing model is the oneat cognitive level, which reflects the nature of interpreting. However, most processing modelsare built over the interpreting between Western languages. With the shift of pivot of world,interpreting into and from Asian and Arabic languages comes to the center of interpretingstudies in recent years. This has left enough space for further study of processing models ofconference interpreting.This thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter One is an introduction to the background, research question and significance aswell as organization of the thesis.Chapter Two is a literature review that introduces interpreting, conference interpretingand processing models of conference interpreting. In this chapter, the author also reviews theprevious researches. The working definition of conference interpreting proposed in2.2.1is considered as the basis of this thesis.Chapter Three is the theoretical foundation of the study. In this chapter, the author firstintroduces the origin, development and achievements of the Interpretive Theory. Moreover, hespecially introduces the key concepts of the Interpretive Theory, including deverbalization,the triangular model and the interpreter training model. The Interpretive Theory is apredominant theory that has been applied into both translation and interpreting studies. Thispaper uses it as the theoretical foundation, for it shares the same target of interpreting with theprocessing models to be studied in the subsequent chapter.Chapter Four is an evaluation of the processing models of conference interpreting. Theevaluation unfolds from two aspects. One is the correlations between processing models,namely the development and relations of these models. The other is a detailed evaluation ofmajor components of these models.Chapter Five is the reconstruction of the processing model of conference interpreting.Reconstruction never comes from nowhere. Components proposed in this chapter all derivefrom the evaluation of the previous models with the aim of refining them. These componentstogether form a refined processing model of conference interpreting.Chapter Six is a conclusion of the research, including major findings of this study,limitations and suggestions for future research.