A Study Of Extralinguistic Knowledge And Working Memory In Simultaneous Interpreting

Simultaneous interpreting is believed to be a complicated activity in which language and information are processed under time limitation. It is affected by a number of factors. This thesis presents a research starting from exploring possible factors influencing simultaneous interpreting.This thesis is composed of five chapters.Chapter1gives an introduction of interpreting and simultaneous interpreting, after which a list of internal and external factors was worked out based on the Interpretive Theory of the Paris School, Gile’s Effort Model, Cokely’s sociolinguistic model and some other related research, as factors influencing simultaneous interpreting have been inadequately studied.Chapter2presents three interviews conducted in light of grounded theory. In the interviews, the list of factors was verified and enriched. According to the39participants, there were mainly13factors in4categories, among which memory was thought to be one of the most influential factors affecting simultaneous interpreting.Therefore, the author focused on memory and further probed into the influence of memory on simultaneous interpreting. Chapter3reviews the studies of memory in both cognitive psychology and simultaneous interpreting for deeper insight. The previous studies by interpreting researchers mainly went into two directions:working memory in simultaneous interpreting and extralinguistic knowledge in simultaneous interpreting. Therefore, the author conducted two experiments to explore the correlation between working memory, extralinguistic knowledge and simultaneous interpreting.Chapter4presents the research findings and discussion of the experiments. Significant correlation between extralinguistic knowledge and simultaneous interpreting was found and correlation between working memory and simultaneous interpreting was found. That is to say, with no significant difference in language knowledge, language transfer capability and command of interpreting techniques, better working memory correlates with better simultaneous interpreting performance, and richer extralinguistic knowledge would lead to better performance.Chapter5gives a brief summary of the previous chapters, concludes the contribution and limitations of the present study and raises tentative suggestions for future research.