Long-term Memory In Interpreting-Strategies To Improve Long-term Memory Performance

Interpreting as a science is very young: studies on interpretation started from t-he mid of the 20th century and they mainly focused on its characteristics of being oral, the principles of interpreting, qualifications for interpreters, and teaching materials. With the development of interpretation research, more and more people have begun to introduce other sciences to facilitate the study on interpretation, such as cognitive psychology, experimental psychology and psycholinguistics.The author also carries out this study from the perspective of cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology emerging in middle 1950s mainly studies on psychological or cognitive processes, including sense, attention, mental image, memory, thinking and speech.` Memory plays a significant role in interpreting: it is involved in such active processes as information perception, encoding, storage and retrieval. Interpreters first identify and retain the incoming information when listening to the source language speech, then analyze, encode, and store the information, and finally recognize and recall the retained information by active retrieval and encode the message into the target language.There have been some researches on memory in interpreting but most of them haven't explored it thoroughly. This thesis explores more on memory study in interpreting, especially the long-term memory in interpreting.The author first introduces memory mechanism in interpreting, the significance of long-term memory, the factors affecting long-term memory performance and strategies to improve it, and then some suggestions to improve long-term memory performance. Finally, the author uses a case to support the study.The author hopes that thesis will contribute a little to the study of long-term memory in interpreting.