A Practice Report On Simulated Consecutive Interpreting For A China-Pakistan Symposium Under The Guidance Of The Schema Theory

This paper is a practice report of a simulated consecutive interpreting task done by the author during his internship at the International College of Defense Studies(ICDS)of the National Defense University(NDU).As an intern interpreter,the author attended a high-level ChinaPakistan symposium on the theme of “Bilateral Exchanges and Cooperation”.Speakers at the symposium included leaders of the two countries’ NDUs as well as many renowned scholars on international relations.The author selected the leaders’ remarks and six guest speakers’ speeches from both sides as materials for simulated consecutive interpreting as well as the following case analysis in this report after the symposium.As a concept originated from cognitive psychology,schema refers to the organizational structure stored in the human brain,which reflects a person’s cognition of the external world.The sum of schemata is the whole knowledge of a person.The Schema Theory has long been studied in EFL(English as a Foreign Language)reading and listening and has been gradually applied to interpreting studies.Previous researches show that interpreting performance correlates positively with the accumulation of schemata.Under the guidance of the Schema Theory,the author analyzed the recordings of his simulated consecutive interpreting.From the perspectives of linguistic schemata,formal schemata and content schemata,the author discussed how schemata affected his performance when he faced various challenges in the interpreting process.These challenges came from the phonetics,vocabulary and proverbs in the linguistic aspect,the structuring and organizing cues as well as speech etiquette in the formal aspect,and the thematic knowledge,encyclopedia knowledge and terminological knowledge in the content aspects.If the interpreters have insufficient schemata reserve at these three levels,their performance in interpreting may be affected.Accordingly,this report puts forward two suggestions for future interpreting practices.First,the interpreter should be able to anticipate his/her potential lack of schemata and make oriented pre-task preparation.Second,the interpreter should strive to store in the brain as many schemata as possible so as to improve his/her interpreting performance.