Influence Of Background Knowledge On Translation Majors’ Current Affairs Interpreting

The study aims to investigate the role of background knowledge in interpreting by an empirical experiment and tries to address these two questions:1. Does background knowledge significantly influence interpreting performance?2. If so, in what way does background knowledge influence interpreting performance?On the basis of previous theoretical and empirical studies, in this study, an experiment is designed to answer these two questions. Forty five third-year graduates majoring in English were invited to join in the experiment. They were asked to do consecutive interpreting from English to Chinese and finish a questionnaire containing100background knowledge points in the21st Century. Another15English graduates and20post-graduates were invited to fill in the questionnaire as well.Based on the participants’performances, it can be concluded that background knowledge plays a very important role in interpreting especially in the interpreting of political texts. Background knowledge not only influences the grasp of basic information and underlying logic but also affects the interpreter’s psychological condition.The results of the questionnaire show that with another two years’ training and learning, the acquisition of background knowledge improves. However, the level of background knowledge of post-graduates is still not satisfied. Therefore, in the aspect of interpreting training and teaching, more emphasis should be laid in the accumulation of background knowledge.Though there are certain limitations regarding the size of experiment population, the control of variables and the evaluation criteria in the study, the findings here do propose some implications for interpreting trainings and future studies, covering background knowledge acquisition, activation, application, its psychological impact and etc.