Conjectures And Refutations

The complexity of simultaneous interpreting (SI) has aroused the interest of many researchers ever since the advent of SI in the 1940s. The development of cognitive science has greatly changed the landscape of SI studies in the past fifty years. While many studies examined the functions and skills of individual cognitive process(es) in SI, few addressed the evolution of SI research and developmental implications of relations between interpreting studies and cognitive science. The underlying driving force of the progression of SI studies remains to be unexplored. This dissertation explores the evolution of researches on cognitive processes in SI and relates it to the interaction between SI studies and cognitive science against a reconstructed historical background, and makes a comparative study of simultaneous interpreting studies in the western countries and in China.This dissertation is the first attempt to adopt an evolutionary approach to examine the progression of SI studies and to relate it to that of cognitive science. The dissertation investigates western SI studies from 1950 to 2007 both qualitatively and quantitatively on a case by case basis, followed by a corpus-driven research on SI studies' bibliography in the West (2000-2007) and in China (1994-2007). The results indicate that the development of SI studies in the West has been generally in line with Popper's evolutionary theory of knowledge in a much complicated pattern. To better illustrate the evolution process, a roadmap is proposed to account for conjectures, refutations and inheritance in SI studies.The dissertation identifies cognitive science as the main source of conjectures and refutations in SI studies, in the sense that SI studies rely significantly on theories and models of cognitive science in eliminating errors in previous researches. SI studies have successfully followed cognitive science in transforming from disembodied cognition to embodied cognition, broadened the scope of its inquiry to include subjectivity and context in situated cognition. However, in spite of the rapprochement it may have seemingly achieved in SI and cognitive science, the interface between the two fields has always been a problem of overriding importance that might hinder the potential growth for simultaneous interpreting studies. In contrast, the corpus-based analysis of bibliography of Chinese interpreting studies' doesn't show similar progression pattern and interface discrepancy, which is not an inviting suggestion to interpreting studies in China. The data given in the present dissertation show the existence of a big gap between China and the West in terms of the quantity and quality of interpreting studies and simultaneous interpreting studies in particular. In view of the existing problems of SI research in China, a number of proposals are made to ameliorate SI studies and evolution research in the future.