Study of Americans'' Difficulty in Learning English-Chinese Interpretation—From a Cross-Lingual Perspective

• Main Authors: Yue-fon Wu, 吳岳峰
• Other Authors: Tai-Tzong Kuo
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/44563349199124168128

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 美洲研究所碩士班 === 98 === This study is aimed at finding out Americans’ difficulties in learning English-Chinese interpretation. The subjects of the study are 56 American English native speakers, aged from 19 to 52 years old, with a mean in 26 years in age. All of the subjects could be classified as learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL), in that their experience of learning Chinese had been limited to mostly educational settings, and none of them came from bilingual families. Therefore, their Chinese acquisition could not be termed naturalistic. The research findings are as follows: The immersed CFL learners, who have spend quite a long time in Taiwan or Chinese-speaking countries, are not qualified interpreters although they can speak fluent Chinese. In regards to interpretation, what they lack is the following competence. Firstly, encyclopedic vocabulary and knowledge (from A to Z) are the most fundamental foundation in order to build up the interpretation competence. The second is the language autonomy. Qualified interpreters have to overcome the language distance between source and target languages in order to achieve language autonomy, which cannot be reached merely by immersed courses in target language countries. The grammatical, syntactical and semantic knowledge of target language should be obtained to get rid interpretation redundancy caused by the overuse of paraphrase and, most of all, caused by collocational deficit. The third is the target-language culture, which cannot be separated from the target language itself. Most of the interpretation students remain in the early phase, in which the new culture is almost totally inaccessible, causing various cultural shocks.