Study Of Working Memory In Simultaneous Interpreting

With the rapid development of world economy and frequent exchanges of nations inthe scopes of culture, politics and science and technology, interpreting as the bridge forpeople using different languages has been the hot spot attracting researchers’ attention. Anincreasing number of language graduates choose interpreting as their career. In scientificand technological domain, due to the booming of science and technology, frequentexchanges of advanced techniques and the leap of international trade negotiations, there areincreasing demands for expert interpreters.It is widely accepted that China is a leading energy consumer. In virtue of limitationsof coal-storing insufficiency and backwardness of some techniques, China has to beengaged in the procurement of coal mines and learning other nations’ advanced techniquessuch as coal mining, transportation and processing as well as introducing abroad advancedequipments for guaranteeing safe, highly efficient and environment-friendly exploitation,and scientific and sustainable development. Therefore, coal industry is in need of a numberof qualified interpreters to serve in this field.Simultaneous interpreting (SI) has attracted great attention of home and abroadresearchers since it is one of the most complex and difficult interpreting tasks. Interpretershave to do the following cognitive tasks almost at the same time: listening to the sourcelanguage speech, extracting meaning of the source language information, retrievingrelevant information from long-term working memory (WM), storing information for laterprocessing, integrating relevant information, producing the source language messages in thetarget language smoothly, and monitoring the target language production for possiblecorrections. So many researchers have attempted to illustrate the information processing inSI. Gile’s Effort Models of interpretation is one of the most salient and influentialrepresentative owing to its clear and vivid exhibition of SI process. With the developmentof researches, researchers started to attach great importance to each cognitive stage engagedin SI, memory in particular. At the beginning, most researchers applied Atkinson&Shiffrin’s multi-store memory model, including the sense memory, the short-term memoryand the long-term memory for explaining memory process in interpreting. However, researchers progressively found that the multi-store memory model cannot completelydemonstrate the complicated cognitive processing of WM in interpreting. Until Baddeleyproposed the concept of working memory (WM) accounting for information store andprocessing in the multi-component model of WM, the problem has been solved. Hence,Baddeley’s multi-component model of WM has exerted remarkable influences on thisdomain.Presently, researchers focus either on information processing in SI or just on WMmodel of interpreting while few attempts to combine them together for describing the WMprocessing in SI. Therefore, based on the theories of Gile’s Effort Model of SI andBaddeley’s multi-component model of WM, the WM model in SI is put forward in thethesis to reflect information processing and storing engaged in WM during SI. In addition,the features of English for coal industry are analyzed and special interpreting strategies aresuggested in the thesis. By integrating the analysis with WM processing model in SI withfactors affecting WM in SI, main methods for improving WM in SI are suggested,particularly for staff that tend to engage in coal industry. These methods consist of logicreconstructing exercise, retelling exercise, enriching long-term memory (LTM), mentalmodeling exercise and shadowing exercise.The author hopes that the thesis can provide some theoretical basis and systematicalexercise methods for those who want to work as interpreters in coal industry.