Exploring The Frontiers Of Simultaneous Interpreting Studies

Simultaneous interpreting（SI）has received widespread attention in the 21^stcentury since it saves time and enhances efficiency in facilitating communication among people from different language backgrounds.Meanwhile,empowered by the development of technology,scientometrics has contributed a lot to analyze the literature of a research field.However,to the best knowledge of the author,few studies have adopted a retrospective review of SI research using scientometrics.This paper conducts a document co-citation analysis（DCA）using the software Cite Space to explore the frontiers of SI research.The database includes 278 journal articles with over 8000 references published between 2001 and 2020 on Web of Science.The searching topic contains“simultaneous interpret*”or“conference interpret*”.Prior to DCA,an analysis of fundamental statistics shows that the year 2020 has seen most publications.The change in the volume of publications is roughly in line with the growing trend of SI research.A DCA was conducted and 7 prominent clusters were selected.A timeline view shows how clusters have evolved over time.The result of a burstness detection suggests that ten books and journal articles were most frequently cited in this field.Based on the findings,this paper concluded the following results 1)the hot topics of SI research in the past two decades include neurocognition,working memory,cognitive load,interpreting performance,human brain mechanism;2)influence of representative scholars are still far-reaching,while that of new publications is also increasing day by day;3)no critical transition in the development of SI studies has been spotted and most of the recent research is guided by previous studies;4)the interdisciplinary characteristics of SI research are obvious.