A Cognitive Approach To Consecutive Interpretation--Instructions On Interpretation Training

There are two most widely used forms of interpretation, namely, consecutive interpretation and simultaneous interpretation. In case the interpreter interprets between chunks of the original speech (or rather, immediately after the speaker has completed a fairly long paragraph), he will be doing consecutive interpreting. Because of its convenience and accuracy, consecutive interpretation is widely used in lectures, political talks, business meetings and news conferences. Interpretation studies in China began in the late 1970s. It lags far behind its practice. Most studies are experience-oriented, and are restricted to exchanging experiences and introducing techniques. Besides, they usually come within the internal structure of translation studies and seldom involve the use of new fruits of other fields such as psycholinguistics, neuropsychology, and cognition science.This thesis makes a study of consecutive interpretation from cognitive linguistic and neuropsychological aspects, to be specific, from input information units, information processing and output information units as well as the interpreters' cognitive abilities, hoping that it can make the features of consecutive interpretation more distinct and thus helps us to gain more thorough and profound understanding of the essence and characteristics of it. The author thinks that as translation and consecutive interpretation have been proved to be complex cognitive processes, it may hypothesize that the external differences between these two translating activities can be explained by the different cognitive processes underlying these tasks of bilingual and cross-culture communication.The thesis also makes a comparative study of interpretation models, which have contributed a lot to the explanation to the specific attention-distribution of consecutive interpretation, for the purpose of finding a more effective way to have interpretation training.