（外国语言学及应用语言学专业论文）背景知识对英汉同声传译效果的影响.pdf

论文摘要 本篇论文应用理解方程同声传译精力分配模式循环性模式和语言心理学方面的理论 阐释了背景知识对英汉同声传译质量的影响基于上述理论支持和前人所做的研究本 篇论文旨在回答如下问题 1 背景知识是否会对英汉同声传译的质量产生显著性影响 2 如果产生显著性影响那么英语语言的熟练程度是否可以减轻因缺乏背景知识而导 致的负面影响 3 如果英语语言的熟练程度可以减轻这种负面影响那么是否可以取代背景知识对同 声传译质量的影响 4 英汉同声传译中主要涉及到哪些心理机制 本篇论文采用实验研究的方法实验对象为对外经济贸易大学英语专业三年级研究生 实验中选定两篇文章实验对象对其中一篇文章有较多的背景知识而对另外一篇文章 的背景知识则较少实验内容为对这两篇文章进行现场同声传译在本实验中背景知 识和语言熟练程度被设定为自变量同声传译质量被设定为因变量其他因素被控制为 常数对实验结果采用了定量分析与定性分析在定量分析中对实验所得的数据进行 了描述性统计分析和推断性统计分析在定性分析中主要从译文的语言质量和内容两 个角度入手分析了单个测试者的翻译效果 在对实验结果进行认真的定量分析与定性分 析之后作者得出如下结论背景知识对英汉同声传译的质量会产生显著性影响英语 熟练程度可以减轻因缺乏背景知识而导致的负面影响 但不能取代背景知识对同声传译 质量的影响英汉同声传译过程中主要涉及到的心理机制包括图式处理容限以及自上 而下与自下而上过程等 本篇论文同时检验了口译方面的一些理论以及前人所做研究的成果 因为实验对象是对 外经济贸易大学英语专业三年级研究生 本篇论文对高等院校同声传译的培训也具有一 定的借鉴意义 关键词背景知识语言熟练程度同声传译 abstract the thesis applies comprehension equation, the effort model of simultaneous interpretation, the sequential model and psycholinguistic theories to illustrate the effect of background knowledge on the performance of english-chinese simultaneous interpretation. supported by the above mentioned theories and based on the previous studies, the thesis intends to answer the following questions: 1. does background knowledge exert a significant effect on the performance of english-chinese simultaneous interpretation? 2. if background knowledge exerts a significant effect, does english proficiency reduce the negative effect caused by the lack of background knowledge? if so, can it override the effect of background knowledge? 3. what are the major mental mechanisms involved in english-chinese simultaneous interpretation? the study is an empirical research based on experimental tests on the third-year postgraduates majoring in english at the university of international business and economics (uibe). the subjects are required to simultaneously interpret one passage on which they have much background knowledge and the other on which they have little background knowledge. in the experiment, background knowledge and language proficiency are the two independent variables and the performance of simultaneous interpretation is taken as the only dependent variable with other factors controlled as constants. both quantitative and qualitative analyses are adopted to analyze the subjects interpretation performance on the two passages. in quantitative analyses, the author uses descriptive and inferential statistical analyses to analyze the data from the experiment. in qualitative analyses, individual subjects interpretation performance is analyzed in terms of the quality of the target language and the content of the reproduction. the author draws the following conclusions after carefully analyzing the experimental results: 1. background knowledge exerts a significant effect on the performance of english-chinese simultaneous interpretation. 2. english proficiency reduces the negative effect caused by the lack of background knowledge. but it can not override the effect of background knowledge. 3. the major mental mechanisms involved in english-chinese simultaneous interpretation are schemata, processing capacity, and top-down and bottom-up processing. as a by-product, the thesis testifies theories on interpretation, psycholinguistic theories, and findings of previous studies. as the subjects participating in the experiment are third-year postgraduates majoring in english at uibe, the study may shed light on the training of english-chinese simultaneous interpretation provided by universities and colleges. key words: background knowledge, language proficiency, simultaneous interpretation acknowledgement the writing of the thesis would not have been possible without the support, advice and encouragement provided by a large number of people to whom i am truly indebted. while mentioning all of them here is not possible, i do want to acknowledge the following individuals. first of all, i would like to express my sincere gratitude to prof. sui yun, my supervisor, who has been guiding me all the way through my academic pursuit at the university of international business and economics (uibe). it has been a great privilege and joy to work under her guidance. i am grateful to prof. sui for her supervision of the thesis. throughout the process of writing the thesis, she gave me helpful suggestions, provided guidance for the overall structure and patiently revised my drafts. my indebtedness to prof. sui is beyond what words can convey. during the debate of my thesis proposal, prof. wang enmian, prof. chen yanjun and prof. wang xinhong all put forward good and practical suggestions which proved to be essential to the completion of the thesis. hereby i extend my thanks to them. my gratitude also goes to prof. chen sudong, for in her course of psycholinguistics i received lectures on psycholinguistic theories which inspired the idea of making the present study. i am also grateful to prof. zhang zuocheng, who referred me valuable reference materials for measuring language difficulty degree of passages. i owe a special debt to ben dunnett, a canadian studying at uibe, for his kind assistance with the recording of the passages to be interpreted for the experiment and insightful suggestions on the experiment. in addition, i do want to acknowledge zhang guokun, xian peng and wu pengfei, my roommates, for their brilliant insights and valuable suggestions given to me whenever i encountered difficulties. in the process of writing the thesis, i quoted ideas of many researchers and findings of their studies, which served as the foundation of my thesis. i am grateful to them for their valuable ideas and findings. my best friends have always been concerned with the progress i made in the study. it is their care that gave me full confidence and courage when i felt discouraged. i shall now express my gratitude to them. i also take this opportunity to express my heartfelt thanks to my classmates who gave me full support by taking the time to participate in the experiment as the subjects in spite of their busy schedules. without their help, the experiment could not have been carried out. finally, i would like to extend my thanks and deepest respect to my parents, who have been encouraging me to finish the thesis. it is their encouragement that gave me spiritual strength to overcome all the difficulties arising in the thesis and other aspects of my life. i always feel indebted to them and try to do everything possible to make them delighted. 1 chapter one a brief introduction to the present study while interpretation has existed since time immemorial, simultaneous interpretation (si) did not emerge until the final stage of the nuremberg trials and the first years of the united nations. because of its unique advantage of occupying no other time than that taken by the original speaker, si has been in use in the united nations organization ever since its experimental service around 1945-1946. along with the current acceleration of economic globalization, si now plays an increasingly important role in cross-cultural communications. the development of chinas market economy and opening-up have brought and will also bring many opportunities for foreign exchanges, which more urgently calls for a large number of competent simultaneous interpreters than at any other time in the chinese history. given the current situation, many publications have introduced training methods for si and some studies have also been made in this area. a careful examination by the author has indicated that most of the publications and studies are based on personal experiences without carrying out in-depth theoretical exploration. however, it is almost impossible to have a complete understanding of si without examining the psychological processes and mechanisms involved from the perspective of cognitive science and psycholinguistics. in addition, during si training period, great importance is often attached to the improvement of trainees language proficiency and the techniques and strategies to be employed, thus neglecting the importance of background knowledge in si performance. therefore, it is necessary to explore the role of background knowledge in si with the help of cognitive science and psycholinguistics. many studies have been made on the effects of background knowledge on second language reading comprehension and listening comprehension. based on the findings of these studies as well as theories on interpretation and other psycholinguistic theories, the present study aims to explore the effect of background knowledge on the performance of english-chinese si and identify its role in si. mainly two processes are involved in si: comprehension and reproduction. this study focuses on the comprehension process. 2 the major hypothesis of the present study is that background knowledge exerts a significant effect on the performance of english-chinese si. if the hypothesis is proved to be true, the present study aims to further find out whether english proficiency reduces the negative effect caused by the lack of background knowledge. the study also intends to explore whether english proficiency can override the effect of background knowledge on english-chinese si if it does reduce the negative effect. the methodology adopted in the thesis is an empirical research through experimental tests on the third-year postgraduates majoring in english at the university of international business and economics (uibe). in the experiment, background knowledge and language proficiency are the two independent variables. other factors, such as the register and vocabulary of the selected passages are controlled as constants. the two passages are recorded at the normal speed by ben dunnett, a canadian studying at uibe. and the quality of recording is also well controlled to ensure the comparability of the two passages. the interpretation performance is taken as the only dependent variable. both quantitative and qualitative analyses are applied in analyzing the interpretation performance, which is measured by the number and percentage of information units interpreted and errors made by the subjects, the quality of the target language, and the content of the reproduction. the study reveals the mental mechanisms involved in english-chinese si and the role of background knowledge in the mechanisms. since the subjects in the experiment are the third-year postgraduates majoring in english at uibe, the study may bring some suggestions on the training of english-chinese si provided by universities and colleges. meanwhile, this study also testifies theories on interpretation, psycholinguistic theories and findings of previous studies. the analyses of the experimental data prove the correctness of these theories and findings. 3 chapter two theory review and previous studies 2.1 theory review 2.1.1 theories on interpretation 2.1.1.1 the comprehension equation it has become a well-established fact among interpreting instructors, theoreticians and practitioners that comprehension, one of the two essential processes involved in si, goes beyond the simple recognition of words and linguistic structures. daniel gile, in his book basic concepts and models for interpreter and translator training (1995: 78), puts forward a comprehension equation. according to him, the comprehension of a speech should be attributed to the interaction of three elements: knowledge of language, extralinguistic knowledge and analysis. he expresses the relationship in the following way: c = kl + elk + a in the equation, c stands for comprehension, kl for knowledge of the language, elk for extralingusitic knowledge, and a for analysis. “=” does not mean equality, but refers to the result of the interaction between kl, ekl and a. “+” means interaction. from the point of gile (1995: 85), extralingusitic knowledge can be broken down into two subcategories: preexisting knowledge (background knowledge) and knowledge acquired from the text itself (contextual knowledge). gile (1995:79) also points out that “the basic relation shown in the equation is complementary between kl and elk: the higher the level of each component, the better the resulting comprehension”. but the contribution of kl to comprehension levels off at a point where better command of the language does not help much. unlike kl, however, the contribution of elk does not level off at a certain point. when doing conference interpreting, the more the interpreter knows about the situation (more elk), the more likely he understands the speakers discourse accurately and takes into consideration the interests of the participants in 4 communication, their lines of reasoning, positions, wishes, weakness and interaction. the understanding contributes much to interpretation performance in that it facilitates anticipation and speech comprehension, enables the interpreter not only to work out linguistic disambiguation, but also to read between the lines. from the equation, it can be seen that background knowledge, as one subcategory of elk, plays a great role in the comprehension process involved in si. most of the interpreters have a good command of both the source language and the target language. for them, the improvement of language proficiency will not contribute much to the comprehension because the contribution of kl levels off at a certain point according to gile. it is background knowledge that affects their si performance. in addition, there are more obstacles involved in si which could generate negative effects on si performance. attention-sharing reduces the capacity available for speech comprehension. and interference between source language and target language also makes comprehension more difficult. the availability of background knowledge can reduce the negative effects caused by the obstacles and make comprehension easier to a certain extent. 2.1.1.2 the effort model of si according to gile (1995: 169), si can be modeled as a process consisting of four efforts, namely the listening and analysis effort l, the short term memory effort m, the speech production effort p and a coordination effort c: si = l + m + p + c gile defines the effort l as “consisting of all comprehension-oriented operations, from the analysis of the sound waves carrying the source-language speech which reach the interpreters ears, through the identification of words, to the final decisions about the meaning of the utterance” (1995: 162). and the effort p is defined as “the set of operations extending from the mental representation of the message to be delivered to speech planning and the performance of the speech plan” (1995: 165). gile holds that the effort m occurs during si “due to the lag between the moment speech sounds are heard and the moment they are interpreted: phonetic 5 segments may have to be added up in memory and analyzed until they allow identification of a word or phoneme” (1995: 168). in the above equation, the effort c is required to coordinate the other three efforts. at each point in time, each effort has specific processing capacity requirements that depend on the task it is engaged in, namely the particular comprehension, short-term memory or production operations being performed on speech segments. during si, two or three of the efforts are active simultaneously because there is now ample evidence that interpreters do listen and speak at the same time. the total requirements (tr) can be presented as a sum of the individual requirements: tr = lr + mr + pr + c lr stands for capacity requirements for effort l, mr for capacity requirements for effort m, pr for capacity requirements for effort p and c for capacity requirements for effort c. gile (1995: 170) proposes that in order for interpretation to proceed smoothly, the following five conditions have to be met: (1)tr ta (ta stands for total available processing capacity) (total processing capacity requirements should not exceed the total available capacity.) (2) lr la (la stands for capacity available for effort l) (3) mr ma (ma stands for capacity available for effort m) (4) pr pa (pa stands for capacity available for effort p) (5) cr la), however, the interpreter would have to devote more attention to effort l and have inadequate capacity left for effort p, effort m and effort c, which will lead to poor si performance. 2.1.1.3 the sequential model according to this model proposed by daniel gile (1995: 103), interpreters formulate a meaning hypothesis for the speech segment by relying on knowledge of the source language and the relevant part of background knowledge contained in their knowledge base. then interpreters check the meaning hypothesis for plausibility with the help of background knowledge contained in their knowledge base. if the first meaning hypothesis is found not to be plausible, interpreters try to construct another meaning hypothesis. if the second meaning hypothesis is still not compatible with the information possessed, a third meaning hypothesis is formulated. when the meaning hypothesis passes the plausibility test, interpreters move on to the next phase, namely the reformulation of this meaning hypothesis in the target language. according to gile, during this phase interpreters also test the target-language reformulation for acceptability by relying on knowledge of the target language and background knowledge again. if the reformulation is tested to be acceptable, interpreters will then quickly process the next incoming speech segment. during the loop process, interpreters must make their analyses and decisions as quickly as they can. for further details on the loop process of the sequential model, 7 please refer to appendix five. it is indicated from the seq