Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Background of this study
As the comprehensive national power of China keeps on growing, China is attractingmore and more attention from across the world and is playing a more and more importantrole on the international stage of socio-economic and cultural exchanges. Simultaneousinterpreting (SI) which serves as a bridge for intercultural communication has received agreat deal of attention from scholars on translation and interpretation as well as thegeneral public. For many Chinese people, especially for those who have failed to I earn aforeign language well, simultaneous interpreters seem to be the role models who haveachieved the highest level of learning a foreign language. They are particularly curiousabout the secret of those interpreters' success, the methods that SI trainers use, thefindings of research on second language acquisition (SLA), and the insight into SIprocesses from research on cognitive psychology. Traditionally, the biggest obstacle toChinese-English SI has been attributed to the fact that interpreters or SI practitionersapply their first language (LI) knowledge subconsciously to the reproduction of meaningexpressed in the source-language speech in the target language or the second language(L2). As a result, language transfer has been studied by many scholars and the role of LIhas been discussed heatedly. Over the last few decades, language transfer has beenreassessed several times with the backup of different studies. In the 1950s，it wasregarded as the most important factor in L2 learning as well as in 叩proaches to L2teaching. In the 1960s，as learner errors were increasingly found to be unrelated withlanguage transfer，the amount of evidence for language transfer was becomingunderwhelming. Since the 1980s, however，a neutral perspective emerged and it helpedpeople to rethink the role of language transfer from a cognitive framework.Language transfer, in this thesis, specifically refers to the role that the mother tongue(MT) of Chinese people plays in the production of English as a foreign language.According to previous studies, language transfer can be classified into positive languagetransfer and negative language transfer. When LI and L2 are similar, LI will facilitate theprocess of L2 learning. Conversely，when L2 is different from LI, the learner's LIknowledge can interfere with L2 learning. However, negative language transfer hasattracted more attention from scholars and studies of negative language transfer faroutnumber those of positive language transfer. In other words，positive language transferhas been less discussed in previous studies. In terms of language transfer, both researcherson L2 and L2 learners have reached a consensus that the structure of Chinese differs fromthat of English and this difference is regarded as the biggest obstacle to Chinese studentslearning English. According to the data from previous studies which monitor C-E SI，it isclaimed that influence exerted by simultaneous interpreters' MT, i.e. Chinese，affects thequality of SI. In other words，whenever we hear a high-quality SI, it is inferred that thesimultaneous interpreter has successfully avoid the influence exerted by Chinese whenundertaking a task of C-E SI. Besides, it is also suggested that thinking in English willhelp the interpreter get rid of negative transfer from his/her MT. Theories and researcheson the mechanism, characteristics and skills of C-E SI also suggest that high-qualitysimultaneous interpretation results largely from overcoming negative language transfer.One of the reasons for paying much less attention to positive transfer than tonegative transfer is that negative transfer is more easily observed in the learning ofEnglish or C-E SI. When errors occur in the production of English, it is these errors thatattract attention from researchers instead of the correct parts, which may explain thatnegative language transfer is studied much more carefully than its counterpart. Therefore，some
