Listening Comprehension Barriers In Consecutive Interpreting And The Coping Methods From The Perspective Of Cognitive Psychology

This paper focuses on listening comprehension and its barriers in consecutive interpreting. Listening comprehension is the first and the foremost step during the process of consecutive interpreting. The quality of listening comprehension has a direct impact on the entire interpreting performance, thus there is no interpreting without listening comprehension. Different from common listening in other situations like foreign language classes, listening comprehension in CI is far more complicated and professional. To fully convey the meaning of source language, the interpreters need to concentrate on meaning acquisition rather than just the surface-level linguistic structure. In addition, other problems such as noisy working environment and English variants may arise during the actual CI practice, which may also cause comprehension barriers. Thus, in order to get a full picture of various listening comprehension barriers during CI and explore several effective methods to reduce their negative influences, this paper, based on the information-processing theory of cognitive psychology, discusses the listening comprehension barriers from both internal and external factors. Moreover, the author also conducts an empirical study about listening comprehension barriers in CI and accordingly tries to put forward some tentative methods to mitigate the contradiction.There are six chapters in this paper: The first part is Introduction, presenting the research background, significance and the layout of the paper. The second part is literature review, introducing process and characteristics of consecutive interpreting, characteristics of listening comprehension in CI and status quo of the topic in home and abroad. Chapter Two is the theoretical framework, which analyzes three models of information-processing and discusses subjective and objective factors which may hinder listening comprehension in CI. Chapter Three is an empirical study, aiming at to how subjective factors and objective factors affect the listening comprehension in CI. Chapter Four is coping methods on the basis of analysis of the experiment, such as routine listening practice and preparation before interpreting task. The last part is Conclusion.