Problems Arising From Lack Of Extralinguistic Knowledge In English-Chinese Consecutive Interpreting And Coping Strategies

Interpreting is a complicated activity,which goes beyond finding the equivalents of words in another language.Instead,it requires the interpreter to grasp the speaker's meaning and to convey it in another language.In order to do that,an interpreter has to possess certain extralinguistic knowledge.Research suggests that extralinguistic knowledge has an impact on an interpreter's listening,memory,delivery,coordination of effort and deductive reasoning.In this thesis,the author analyzes her own consecutive interpreting of a Peter Thiel interview and finds that without enough extralinguistic knowledge,the interpreter finds it hard to allocate her attention effectively.Moreover,she is more likely to make mistakes in deductive reasoning and to lose confidence in her production.To cope with the extralinguistic knowledge that an interpreter may encounter,they should make thorough preparations before the interpreting task and draw some lessons from problems arising from a lack of such knowledge after the task.If an interpreter gets stuck in such knowledge during the task,they should check with the speaker or use skills such as generalization,inference and omission to get around the problem.