A Contrastive Study Of Beginners' Chinese-english Interpreting Efficiency Based On Schema Theory

Globalization,the advent of the information age and cultural diversification areaccelerating international exchanges.Accordingly,enhancing the quality and quantity of interpreters is becoming the focus of concern at home and abroad.Professional training aims at cultivating high-quality interpreters while institutions of higher learning have offered courses in interpreting in order to make students have preliminary understanding of interpreting and foster their interest.To guarantee the effective learning of interpreting,problems and difficulties of interpreting beginners should be diagnosed first.An empirical study is conducted in this thesis by testing 58 beginners who have had some interpreting lessons.29 English majors and 29 non-English majors are chosen from English majors and non-English majors as subjects by the national Test for English Majors Band 4 to ensure that they are same in English proficiency.Then five texts with different topics and genres,including business,diplomacy,science and technology,culture and advertisement are selected as experiment materials to test the subjects' interpreting performances.Based on the transcripts,with the help of SPSS17.0 data analysis software,as well as the qualitative and quantitative research methods,this paper attempts to make a contrastive study of differences in performance between the beginners of English major and non-English major in interpreting five passages,and to probe into the correlation between the beginners' schemata and their interpreting efficiency.That is to see the effectiveness of information input,processing and output guided by Schema Theory.The study proves that in the aspect of linguistic schema,the beginners who are English major perform better than non-English majors in the process of Chinese-English interpreting of the 5 different materials.In terms of content schema,the beginners of English major perform better than those of non-English major in business,diplomacy and culture,but the beginners of non-English major perform better than those of English major in science and technology.In the aspect of formal schema,the beginners of non-English major perform slightly better than those of English major in the 10 advertisements.There is positive correlation between stored schemata and interpreting efficiency,that is,the more schemata which are acquired,the higher the interpreting scores.Therefore,the study emphasizes that learners should construct schemata and puts forward some specific methods and strategies.