Chain Effects Of Prefabricated Chunks And Their Mental Processing On E-C Consecutive Interpreting

Recent studies from psycholinguistics and corpus linguistics have revealed that the majority of our languages are made up of prefabricated chunks.These chunks can be stored and retrieved in our mental lexicon as a whole.Although their role in Second Language Acquisition(SLA)and Language Teaching has been recognized,the study of the effects of prefabricated chunks on interpreting,especially E-C consecutive interpreting,is still scarce.This thesis aims to analyze such chain effects under the guidance of chunk theory and how chunk is stored and processed in our mental lexicon.By recording a lecture interpreting task held in XISU,the author identifies all prefabricated chunks and then analyzes difficulties with prefabricated chunks and their causes in interpreting.Based on the analysis,the thesis suggests how PCs and their mental processing affect E-C interpreting as a chain: 1)without proper storage of prefabricated chunks as a whole,interpreters would not accurately and efficiently understand and memorize the chunks.2)inappropriate note-taking design of prefabricated chunks may lead to the redundancy in note-taking.3)interpreters cannot find out proper TL equivalence for prefabricated chunks,causing disfluency and non-idiomatic TL at the production stage.To solve these issues,the thesis highlights the importance of prefabricated chunks in interpreting learning and teaching and gives relevant suggestions: assimilating and recycling chunks during interpreting training,careful note-taking design for common prefabricated chunks and building up “bilingual mental lexicon” for searching convenient and idiomatic TL equivalence.