An Empirical Study On The Developing Of Practical Interpreting Ability Of Multi-disciplinary Students In Regional Colleges

With the booming of globalization and China’s increasingly deepened and specified cooperation with others countries in professional areas, interpreters capable in both fine language skills and comprehensive professional background knowledge are more and more popular. Since the1990s, majors and training centers related to interpretation have been established in some reputable universities and colleges. And vigorous and notable development in the researches of interpreting teaching has been witnessed. However, studies aiming at English majors were a lot more than those aiming at non-English majors (multi-disciplinary students as mentioned in this thesis). What should be noted is that interpreting learners of English major can hardly satisfy the need of technical interpretation for different professional fields because of their lack of background knowledge in other disciplines. Since the new curriculum standard has been implemented in middle and high schools during the recent years, cultivation of students’ English abilities has been laid more emphasis. Naturally and reasonably, many non-English students enter universities with fine English language skills. Besides, they have a strong desire to improve their English skills. Therefore, it is necessary and feasible to teach interpreting skills to non-English majors who are relatively capable in English.On the basis of the Skopos theory by Vermeer and Nord, this paper mainly discusses the feasibility of teaching non-English majors interpretation, by means of questionnaire, interpreting recording, videotaping, in-depth interview, etc. in the background of the Program of Multi-disciplinary of Interpreting Course of Guangxi University. The author tried to answer the following research questions:1) what is the orientation of teaching multi-disciplinary students interpreting skills in regional universities or colleges?2) what kinds of interpreting skills should be taught to multi-disciplinary students based on the above orientation?3) what advantages do multi-disciplinary students have in interpreting practices after they are taught certain interpreting skills?The results of the study manifest:1) the teaching of the multidisciplinary interpreting course for non-English majors should aim at the teaching of practical skills for communication in community interpreting, due to the fact that interpreting tasks non-English majors usually engaged are community interpreting such as products promotion and technology introduction, etc. in the local market, instead of consecutive interpreting or simultaneous interpreting for governmental conferences;2) based on the features of non-English majors and their interpreting tasks, practicality should be emphasized in the skills training. The practicality refers to teaching non-English majors appropriate skills to fulfill the practical and technical interpreting tasks related to their majors;3) from the empirical study, it is proved that non-English majors in the multidisciplinary interpreting course are competitive in interpreting after they are taught interpreting skills as they have advantages in background knowledge over English majors. With the support of background knowledge, they show more passion and self-confidence than English majors in the interpreting of related topics. Despite of their less competence in grammar, pronunciation and intonation than English majors, non-English majors are more likely to produce interpreting that is more acceptable to the audience with the same background knowledge.This research is a dauntless trial in the field of interpreting applied abilities teaching and learning of non-English majors, and the results of it are expected to inspire and enlighten further researches in this field. However, due to the fact that this study is an empirical one, there are some inevitable limitations in this study, such as the small size of subjects, the limited majors of subjects, and the limited quantity of interpreting materials, et.. These mentioned problems are expected to be solved by researchers in the future studying on related topics.