On The Translation Unit In The Strategy Of Syntactic Linearity-from A Cognitive Approach

Syntactic Linearity is the most commonly used and valued transformation strategy and skill in the practice of Simultaneous Interpretation, which also features the SI practice. The unity of resemblance and formal disparateness among human languages provides the theoretical possibility and necessity for the emergence and employment of the interpretation strategy of Syntactic Linearity. Meanwhile its appearance originates from the practical limitation of human beings' cognitive resource and the practical demand of the spontaneity of Simultaneous Interpretation.However, Syntactic Linearity has long been recognized as merely an interpretation strategy or skill, still far away from a theoretical level for lack of a complete theoretical system. While the first problem concerning the theoretical construction of SI is the notion of translation unit, which, lamentably, has not yet gained consensus in its definition among scholars in the field of traditional textual translation and is even rarely mentioned in SI studies. Since translation is a complex and human-centered cognitive process, the studies can only reach the seeming with production based focus, while the linearity of SL strategy rules out any potentiality of revision and retouch, practically making feasible the studies on the cognitive process of the interpreter. The complexity of SI process and the heterogeneous nature of cognitive mechanism, including Sensory Store, Working Memory, encoding system, etc., demand different processing units at the same time in the interpretation process. Hence, from the perspective of information processing, the translation unit in the strategy of Syntactic Linearity is not a simple measurable notion of unit. Instead it is a stratified and systematic concept with interrelated and interdependent constituents of recognition unit, reference unit, reorganization unit and representation unit, the interaction among which has a remarkable influence on SI performance. Such notion of Stratified System can be further explicated and grounded in case study.