A Cognitive-Psychological Approach To Anticipation Strategy In Simultaneous Interpreting

In Interpretation, anticipation is a cognitive activity which involves a process of analyzing, inferring, and integrating new information with previous input. The application of anticipation strategy in SI is helpful to reducing the interpreter's information load, speeding up information processing and improving the accuracy of interpreting.This paper views anticipation as an important step in information processing and attempts to offer a tentative analysis of the role of anticipation as a strategy in simultaneous interpreting. It is based on a theoretical framework that includes ideas from the relevance theory, Chernov's message probability anticipation model and Robin Setton's cognitive-pragmatic approach. These theories serve to explain the possibility of the anticipation strategy and its working mechanism in SI. Under the guidance of cognitive, linguistic and psychological theories, the author seeks to divide anticipation into two types, linguistic and extra-linguistic. Linguistic anticipation can be achieved at four different levels, i.e. prosody, syntactic, semantic and sense. Extra-linguistic anticipation can be achieved from three aspects: theme, content and intention.To test the possibility of anticipation in SI, the author observes and analyzes the audio clips of some speeches made by heads of states and leaders of international organizations at press conferences, regional and international conferences. The fruits from linguistics, psychology and cognitive science are borrowed to analyze the cases. It is concluded that the strategy of anticipation, if effectively applied, can help to solve the problems posed by the structural differences between English and Chinese.Moreover, the author advocates that training on anticipation skill should be emphasized as an essential part of interpreting training and ventures to propose possible methods that may be employed to enhance the anticipation capability.