A Study On The Relationship Between Attention And Consecutive Interpreting

Language interpreting is the intellectual process or activity involved in transferring a message from one language to another in real time. Attention is a mechanism in human brain to select most important information for processing. The interdisciplinary topic of the role of attention in interpreting has been studied by researchers since the 1960s. Nowadays, it has become one of the most advanced and popular topics in international interpreting researches. However, few domestic researches on the relationship between attention and interpreting have been conducted. What's more, among all researches in the field of interpreting, most of them were about simultaneous interpreting, consecutive interpreting has not been put enough emphasis on. Therefore, the present paper aimed to analyze the role of attention during consecutive interpreting.This study was an experimental study in which two groups of tests are involved. The first group was attention test containing focused attention, divided attention and attention span. These three dimensions of attention were tested by psychology experiment instruments and E-prime programs. The second group was consecutive interpreting tests containing both English to Chinese and Chinese to English interpreting. Participants' performance was recorded in computers.40 participants majored in translation and interpretation took part in this experiment. All the results were collected by software SPSS 16.0. Pearson's correlation test and One-way ANOVA test were carried out for data analysis.After analyzing the research data, this study has come to the final conclusions:(1) Focused attention has a close relationship with both E-C and C-E consecutive interpreting, especially the fluency of interpreters' speech. (2) Divided attention is not correlated to either E-C or C-E consecutive interpreting. Interpreters who have better ability to divide attention among tasks do not necessarily perform better in consecutive interpreting. (3) No correlation between attention span and consecutive interpreting has been detected. During consecutive interpreting, broader attention span may not help interpreters achieve better performance.