Study On The Relashionship Between Working Memory And Consecutive Interpreation

The history of interpretation should be much longer than that of translation. But since there's not much written form of evidence left over due to the characteristic of interpretation, it hasn't been established as an independent branch for study for many years. Rather, people regard it as an oral form of translation. The modern study on interpretation began in the mid 1950s and consecutive interpretation is just one branch in the interpretation family. Since interpretation involves most of the oral work, memory seems to be very important in the study of interpretation.British psychologist Alan Baddeley has conceptualized the intermediate memory as a tripartite system of working memory. This model, which underlies several recent studies of memory in interpreting, posits a limited-capacity attention system, the "central executive," which controls two "slave systems," one for holding and dealing with speech-based information("phonological loop") and the other for visual or spatial information ("visuo-spatial sketchpad") (Baddeley, 1986). The model is a classical one in the field of memory study, and for many years, the memory system has always been a topic for research in interpreting process since memory is quite essential in interpreting activities. And in this paper, we mainly discuss the relationship between working memory and consecutive interpretation performance.This study is an experimental study in which two tests are involved. The first test is the working memory span test. In this test, the subjects are asked to listen to 70 sentences with roughly 12 to 18 words in each sentence. And after listening to each set of sentences, the subjects are required to jot down the last word of each sentence and meanwhile judge the meaningfulness of each sentence. After the test, the subjects will be grouped according to their working memory span and processing rate of the sentences. They are grouped into high, medium and low for further analysis.The second test is the consecutive interpretation test. In this test, the subjects are required to interpret two paragraphs, one in English and the other in Chinese. The testing material is selected from the relevant material for Advanced Interpreters' Examination in Shanghai. Their interpretation work has been recorded in the computer through software named Total Recorder. After that, their performances are scored according to the scoring standard for this examination. Likewise, subjects are also grouped into high, medium and low based on their consecutive interpretation performance.The software SPSS13.0 is applied to analyze the data collected. Firstly, independent-sample test is conducted to testify the relationship between working memory span and consecutive interpretation performance.The results show that working memory span has a positive correlation with Chinese-English interpretation, while it has no positive correlation with English-Chinese interpretation.Bivariate correlation test is also introduced to analyze the correlation between Chinese-English interpretation and English-Chinese interpretation. The result shows that these two directions of interpretation are significantly correlated with each other. That is to say, despite the different role that working memory plays in Chinese-English and English-Chinese interpretation, subjects' performance in the two directions of interpretation is correlated.Meanwhile, by the conduct of independent-sample test, no positive correlations are found between processing rate and consecutive interpretation performance. This is somewhat surprising and may be left for future study.