A Study On The Effects Of Prefabricated Chunks On Student Interpreters' Performance In Chinese-English Political Simultaneous Interpreting

Prefabricated chunks are semi-finished linguistic products,and its flexible structure enables the interpreters to use them easily and creatively.From the perspective of Robin Setton's cognitive-pragmatic model,the author discussed how prefabricated chunks could be applied in Chinese-English political simultaneous interpreting to enhance student interpreters' performance since the features of prefabricated chunks and political speeches are similar.The author recruited 8 candidates to perform a contrast experiment and analyzed their interpreting performance via Andrew Dawrant's scoring system.The findings showed that the interpreting performance was positively related to the frequency of the use of prefabricated chunks,indicating that prefabricated chunks could improve student interpreters' interpreting quality.The study revealed that 1)prefabricated chunks can help interpreters establish a prediction mechanism to relieve pressure.Triggers in the texts can lead the interpreters to choose suitable chunks.Since the chunks are open-ended and the collocation is relatively fixed,the interpreters can predict the possible collocations and choose one that best suits the context;2)provide linguistic frameworks to facilitate the interpreting output.Fixed chunks can be retrieved by interpreters directly,thus relieving the pressure of dealing with fixed expressions and Chinese four-character structure and minimizing the loss of meaning.The study of prefabricated chunks can enlighten interpreting study and teaching.