A Working Memory Perspective On Deverbalization In Chinese-English Simultaneous Interpretation

This study is based on Baddeley's working memory theory and the interpretive theory of translation,and uses experimental method and quantitative and qualitative analysis to explore the relationship between the listening span of the working memory and the deverbalization.The study aims to answer following questions:1.What is the performance of the working memory capacity of student interpreters?2.Is there a correlation between listening span and deverbalization in Chinese-English simultaneous interpretation?3.What are the specific performances of deverbalization of the participants?In this dissertation,two experiments were conducted on nine students from Beijing Foreign Studies University.They were the listening span of working memory capacity and the Chinese-English simultaneous experiment.This study aims to demonstrate a positive correlation between the listening span and the deverbalization frequency.The experimental design and scoring statistics of listening span draw on the experimental process of Daneman and Carpenter.The Chinese-English simultaneous interpretation experiment was carried out in the 301 classroom at the Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation.After the experiment,the author made a verbatim record and referred to the classification criteria of Setton and Motta and Dr.Sun Haiqin to design the deverbalization criteria.The four classifications are reorganization,explanation,omission and addition,and innovation.The authors input the listening span and the number of deverbalization performances into SPSS20.0 software for correlation analysis,compared the correlation between the two groups of data,and analyzed the performance of the participants from four different manifestations of deverbalization performance.Through analysis,the author finds that participants with higher working memory capacity show more frequent deverbalization and their interpretation show more types of deverbalization.After summarizing the analysis of the experimental results,the author concludes that the working memory capacity,especially the listening span,will have a significant impact on the translator's Chinese-English simultaneous interpretation.According to the conclusion,the author proposes that regular training of working memory can be added in the simultaneous interpretation training;the visual sketchpad can be stimulated for language visualization,and interpreters focus on important information points and logical structure words.