A Cognitive-Psychological Approach To Comprehension In Consecutive Interpreting

Consecutive interpreting (CI), as one of the major modes of interpreting, is a communicative act of heavy cognitive-psychological nature. It involves complicated processes of decoding, comprehension and reformulation, etc. The comprehension process is vital to the grasp of accurate and complete meanings of the source language (SL) discourse and hence reformulation of the messages in the target language (TL).However, the complicated information processing in the human brain can not be observed directly from outside and pure linguistic theories can hardly explain fully the working mechanism of the interpreter's comprehension process. Therefore, the author attempts to examine the processing and comprehension of the SL information by the interpreter in CI by applying the science of cognitive psychology and human information processing theories to find out how the interpreter can best direct his attention resources and allocate the limited pool of processing capacity in CI to achieve sound interpreting performance.Based on the theoretical accounts, the author also examines the common problems associated with the comprehension process in practice, including confusion of the linguistic and communicative meanings, logical incoherence and loss of the hidden meaning. General tactics are also suggested before the conclusion of the thesis.