A Study Of Working Memory In Simultaneous Interpreting

Simultaneous interpreting, one branch of interpretation, is a kind of highly complex bilingual activity that is restricted by time, in which with the source utterance constantly being given, the interpreter needs to immediately reformulate all of it in the target language.In simultaneous interpreting, the interpreter has to go through a series of cognitive processing activities such as attending to the information, analyzing the information for meaning, maintaining the information, and finally reformulating the information in the target language. These activities are concurrent in nature and restricted by time, putting heavy cognitive load on the interpreter. Errors and omissions will occur when the interpreter cannot meet the high processing capacity demands.In China, the efforts of the researches of this field always go to the general description of the techniques required to accomplish the complex activity. Papers concerning memory training are mostly written from the perspective of the training of interpreting techniques on the whole, leaving only a few concentrated on the elaboration of memory skills. In the hope of enriching the research in this field, this thesis tries to offer a structured probe into the nature and memory systems of interpreting, which are based on the principles drawn from psychological researches. psycholinguistics and interpretation literatures. Memory plays an important role during the process of interpreting:the sensory memory preserves the sensory stimuli of the source language information; the short-term memory stores the information sent by sensory memory, and processes them based on the knowledge stored in long-term memory; the long-term memory provides relevant knowledge (background information, context information etc.) to help short-term memory process the message. With the interaction of the three memory systems, the interpreter is able to find the equivalents in the target language to reproduce the speech successfully. However, the research focus of current studies lies in the short-term memory, which is believed to be the core part in the cognitive process of simultaneous interpreting. With the constant efforts made by simultaneous interpreting experts, this idea has been updated by a new term-working memory and the most outstanding difference between short-term memory and working memory resides in:"STM is a passive storage buffer that is not involved in the processing of information. Instead, WM system is responsible not only for the storage of information, but also for the simultaneous processing of information. WM, not STM, is the system that plays a role in complex cognitive behavior. And so WM capacity, not STM capacity, is the critical constraint on behavior."This thesis uses the construct of working memory as a theoretical framework to analyze the interpreter’s mechanism of information processing. From the interdisciplinary perspective, it makes a detailed scientific analysis of the interpreter’s comprehension process, information maintenance and retrieval to reveal the required processing capacity. Next, it studies some major factors that may affect the accuracy of working memory and the four most influential working memory models up till now. On the basis of former studies, the author makes a study of the cognitive and information processing stages from the perspective of working memory in simultaneous interpreting in the hope of raising suggestions concerning interpreting memory and training methods to improve the working memory capacity of simultaneous interpreting trainees in the time to come.