A Reflective Study On Working Memory In Simultaneous Interpretation

Since official studies on interpretation in1960s, scholars have been paying closeattention to the memory meachanism for processing linguistic information in complexcognitive activities, especially simultaneous interpretation. The concurrency ofsimultaneous interpretation, that is, the synchronism of listening and analysis of sourcelanguage and production of target language, poses extremely high requirements onmemory capacity of interpreters, moreover, working memory has been defined as acognitive capacity-limited system in charge of both storing and processing information.Therefore, exploration of memory mechanism in simultaneous interpretation from acognitive perspective, especially working memory with the characteristic of short-termmemory has become the core subject of cognitive researches on interpreting at present.This paper tries to make an inquiry into the working memory mechanism insimultaneous interpretation from a cognitive perspective. Via consulting, integratingand analyzing quantitative documents, the author begins her researches with acomparative study on three representative working memory models, attempting toseek their similarities and differences to be aimed at probing into the operationalpattern of working memory. And then another comparative analysis on five typicalprocess models of simultaneous interpretation from a memory perspective isconducted to provide guidance for proposing effective approaches of improvingworking memory. According to the findings, the author endeavors to seek for effectiveapproaches of ameliorating working memory to relieve working memory load, thusfurnishing prerequisite for simultaneous interpreting performance enhancement,shedding light on working memory improvement in interpreting teaching and practice.