The Influence Of Professional Knowledge On E-C Consecutive Interpreting Process And Quality:from The Perspective Of Gile's Effort Models

With faster process of globalization and development of medicine,medicine-themed interpreting activities have been on a dramatic rise in terms of their frequency and number.When studying at a medical university in Chengdu,the author of this thesis served as clinical interpreter,finding that clinical doctors preferred to employ the medical students with a good master of English than English-major students.This phenomenon brought about questions: if students are given related terms before,whether medical background knowledge leads to difference in interpreting performance between medical students and English-major students? Can medical group always outperform English-major group when they interpret medical materials? Does professional knowledge exert different influences on these two groups in terms of interpreting process? Does professional knowledge differently affect these two groups in terms of interpreting quality?With those questions,the author of the thesis designed this small-sized empirical study to investigate the influence of professional knowledge on interpreting performance and process with the theory of Gile's Effort Models.Eleven qualified participants were divided into two groups in accordance with their majors.Two medical materials with different specialization degree were selected with relevant confounding factors being strictly controlled by an audio software or reliable online tools.Terms lists were given to each participant to avoid confounding effect of the terms.A scale based on Gile's interpreting process theory was designed to investigate the influence of professional knowledge on the links of interpreting process.Fluency,accuracy rate and expert's subjective assessment for interpreters' performance were adopted to assess the quality of interpreters' renditions.Statistic method was used to analyze the data mentioned above.The result of the study indicates that: professional knowledge may exert different influences on the medical group and English-major group.As to the quality of interpretation,specialization degree of background knowledge may exert a greater impact on medical group in terms of accuracy and expert's judgment in comparison with English-major group;and medical group may not consistently outperform English-major group for interpreting medical texts.From the perspective of the theory of Gile's Effort Models,professional knowledge may influence medical group through facilitating comprehension and short memory while for English-major group through undermining their note-taking efficiency,short memory,memory recalling and note reading.Additionally,English majors,to some degree,could compensate for their shortage of related professional knowledge by enhancing their language capacity according to Gile's theory and the outcome of this study.This thesis is a small-sized empirical study.Though the number of subjects was not large enough,still the preliminary conclusion could be drawn and the questions raised previously have been answered.Additionally,the suggestion for English-major students of how to overcome the shortage of professional knowledge during interpreting has been proposed in accordance with the experiment results.