Exploring The Influence Of Interpreting Students' Tail-to-Tail Span On Coherence In English-Chinese Simultaneous Interpreting

Simultaneous interpreting(SI)is a complex task where multiple cognitive activities take place at the same time,and this complexity is compounded by working memory limits,for which interpreters work under strict time and capacity constraints.If interpreters lag too long after the speaker has already finished one sentence,their working memory is very much likely to be overloaded with concurrent output and input of two different sentences.The interpreter then risks information loss,which can further contribute to incoherence in the next sentence.Therefore,this study hypothesizes that long lags between the end of the speaker's sentence and the interpreter's corresponding rendition,i.e.tail-to-tail span(TTS),adversely influence the coherence of its subsequent sentence.To test this hypothesis,an empirical study is conducted on 9 interpreting students' English-Chinese SI.Theme-Rheme Theory is explored to illustrate why failing to capture the beginning of a sentence in SI leads to incoherence in the rendition.And Rhetorical Structure Theory(RST)is used to screen out incoherent sentences in the subjects' interpretations and analyze interpretation coherence.In this study,for subjects with less than half of the sentences being incoherent,the most often appearing TTS is 3 seconds,and most TTS-related incoherence happens after TTS?5 seconds.Further observation shows that when TTS?5 seconds,there is a 68%of probability that incoherence can follow.The findings come in line with the research hypothesis,and interpreters are suggested to pay due attention to long TTS in training and practice,adopting strategies to avoid long TTS and the consequent adverse influence.