An Empirical Study On The Impact Of Idioms On The Cognitive Load Of Interpreters And Coping Strategies In Chinese-English Simultaneous Interpreting

The complexity of simultaneous interpreting(SI)process and the limited communication conditions during work make it a heavy cognitive task.How to reasonably deal with the influence of various problem triggers on the interpreter's cognitive load and ensure the quality of SI is widely concerned by the interpreter researchers.Previous researches on this issue mainly focus on the aspects of speed,accent,proper nouns and so on.Guided by Daniel Gile's "Effort Model" theory,in this paper,an empirical study is conducted to demonstrate that idioms can become one of the problem triggers that exert an impact on interpreters'cognitive load in Chinese-English SI and,then,to summarize the coping strategies implemented by the interpreters.This paper employs the performance evaluation method proposed by Brucken to measure the cognitive load of interpreters in SI.The researcher invites ten senior students from the SI course of a certain university as experimental subjects and chooses one part of the speech made by Premier Wen Jiabao at Tsinghua University in 2012 as the experimental text,including 316 Chinese characters,eight Chinese idioms.After the experiment,the researcher collects their recordings of SI and transforms them into words.According to the meaning of different pieces of information,the whole information is divided into 16 segments,to evaluate the performances of interpreters in interpreting segments including and not including Chinese idioms.Later,these experimental data are analyzed from four aspects:1.Compare the cognitive load of interpreters in interpreting segments including and not including Chinese idioms respectively with quantitative analysis,to explore whether Chinese idioms affect the cognitive load of interpreters in SI;2.Analyze the concrete influences of Chinese idioms on the cognitive load of interpreters in SI with qualitative analysis;3.Calculate and summarize the frequencies of using each coping strategy with quantitative analysis;and 4.Analyze the effectiveness of each coping strategy with qualitative analysis.The research findings are as follows:1.Chinese idioms do have an effect on the cognitive load of interpreters;2.Chinese idioms lead to the cognitive "overload" or cognitive energy imbalance of interpreters in the process of SI;3.The frequency of the use of these four strategies,from high to low,is:paraphrase,omission,generalization,literal interpreting;4.In interpreting Chinese idioms with attributive structures,or those with literary quotations or cultural metaphors,paraphrase can best address the influences of Chinese idioms on the cognitive load of interpreters;In interpreting Chinese idioms with little difference between their literal and implied meanings,literal interpreting can effectively address the influences of Chinese idioms on the cognitive load of interpreters;In interpreting Chinese idioms being modifiers of the segment,omission plays a better role in dealing with the influences of Chinese idioms on the cognitive load of interpreters;In interpreting Chinese idioms occurring in pairs,generalization can handle the influences of Chinese idioms on the cognitive load of interpreters.The results of this study are practically critical to the teaching and practice of SI.