A Study Of Conference Interpretation From The Perspective Of Schema Theory

As the economic globalization moves forward, conference interpretation has achieved in-depth development, involving economy, society, culture and other aspects. It made great contribution to international exchange. Conference interpretation is not only a challenging language activity, but also a complex cognitive process which includes the decoding and encoding process of the information. Therefore, it is very important to discuss conference interpretation from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. As one of the cognitive linguistic concepts,schema was first proposed by Bartlett in1932. It refers to a cognitive structure of knowledge and experience. At present, schema theory is widely used in artificial intelligence, second language acquisition and so on.With large amount of domestic and foreign conference interpretations as corpus, this article explores the application of schema in listening comprehension, memorization and expression of conference interpretation by using examples. Through the analysis of the important role of language schema, context schema and formal schema, as well as the bottom-up and the top-down processing models in interpretation, the article finds that the schema theory has a profound significance on interpretation activity. During the conference interpretation, the interpreter firstly can improve his listening comprehension and make positive speculation for further text by activating schema. Secondly, the interpreter can promote his memory and recode the information with the help of schema. Finally, schema can help the interpreter choose the right words, make him vigilant for crisis and ensure his language fluency in the stage of expression.Based on schema theory and detailed analysis, this article shows that schema is a key component of the interpreter’s skills and also explores the interpreter’s mental activities in conference interpretation. The analysis of the article enriches the application of schema in interpretation study and provides a certain degree of enlightenment to preparation of conference interpretation, improvement of interpreting skills, interpretation training and so on.