An Experimental Report On The Effects Of Background Knowledge Acquisition Mode On Interpreting Quality

The globalization highlights interdiscipline and specialization of interpreting,which demonstrates the effects of background knowledge on improving the interpreting quality.Until now,much research on the correlation between background knowledge and interpreting quality has been conducted by scholars theoretically and empirically.However,little attention has been paid to whether different background knowledge acquisition modes may impose different effects on interpreting quality.To explore the correlation between background knowledge acquisition modes and interpreting quality,experimental methodology is adopted with the third year English majors from Nanhang Jincheng College as subjects.The experimental procedures are listed as follows.Firstly,based on the scores of background knowledge test and terminal interpreting test,the differences in the familiarity of background knowledge and interpreting competence are excluded.40 students are chosen as the subjects of the experiment.Then the subjects are classified into two treatment groups with 20 for each group.The first group(reading group)is required to read an English text with the relevant background knowledge in the later experiment.The text is distributed one hour ahead of the experiment.The second group(translation group)is asked to translate the same English background knowledge text which is also distributed one hour ahead of the experiment.In the interpreting experiment,participants are asked to do sight interpreting about “Power Africa” from English-Chinese and Chinese-English respectively.The subjects' interpreting performance is recorded and transcribed after the experiment.Their interpreting qualities are evaluated based on a set of standards including fluency,language accuracy and information completeness to examine the effects of the background knowledge acquisition modes on interpreting performance.By analyzing students' language fluency,language accuracy and information completeness in the interpreting process,the paper shows that there is significant high correlation between background knowledge acquisition modes and interpreting quality.Secondly,there is a strong correlation between background knowledge acquisition modes and interpreting fluency.Compared with the students in reading group,students who acquire the background knowledge by translation can activate the schema in their brains more rapidly and perform much better and more fluently.Thirdly,the research also shows that there is medium correlation between background knowledge acquisition modes and language accuracy.Background knowledge acquisition modes exert an influence on language accuracy to some extent.For the two interpreting tasks,language accuracy of Chinese-English interpreting task is flattened by English-Chinese task.The language accuracy of Chinese-English is higher.Lastly,there is medium correlation between background knowledge acquisition modes and information completeness.For the background knowledge-intensive paragraphs,the target text of translation group is more complete and better.The difference of two groups in information completeness is obvious.While for the paragraphs with little background knowledge,language proficiency and general knowledge exert a significant role and can reduce the negative effect caused by the lack of background knowledge to a certain extent.The implication of this study is that interpreters may adopt different acquisition modes to improve fluency,language accuracy and information completeness and thus to enhance interpreting quality.