4.2 Difficulty8

4.3 Opinions on Cognitive Ability’s Status in Interpreter’s Basic Qualifications..10

4.4 Influence of Special Memory Training on Interpreting Quality.11

4.5 Memory’s Working Form in Interpreting12

4.6 Differences between EC and CE Interpreting..13

4.6.1 Differences in the Working Process..13

4.6.2 Differences in the Pressure.13

4.7 Degree of Difficulty in Different Kinds of Materials14

4.8 Summary and Suggestions.15

4.8.1 Suggestions for Class Management..15

4.8.2 Suggestions for Students.16

Conclusion..17

Acknowledgment..18

Bibliography..19

Appendix.22

1 Introduction 

Interpreting is a real-time oral translation activity based on language information. From the perspective of psychology, interpreting is psychological and logical information activity relating to different languages. The nature of interpreting is interpreter’s memory process and semantic transformation of different languages, requiring short-term retention of words and their meanings in the source and target languages, while simultaneously processing this information for understanding, translation, and production (Cowan, 2001; Daro, V., 1995). Interpreter is required to acknowledge and retain the information while listening and re acknowledge and memorize while interpreting. Thus, memory in interpreting is actually interpreter’s retention and extraction of processed and encoded information. 

A good memory is a necessary requirement for interpreters, which affecting the quality of interpreting directly. A complete memory system is supposed to include sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory. Due to the nature of interpreting, short-term memory enjoys an important role in interpreting. Since college interpreting course mainly focuses on consecutive interpreting, this paper endeavors to analyze the status and functions of short-term memory in consecutive interpreting objectively and evaluate whether the memory training methods are effective and provide an objective data support for putting forward strategies. 

This thesis is pided into four parts. First, the previous study of interpreting memory and several memory training strategies will be introduced briefly. Second, basic information of the respondents and design of the instrument will be clarified. Third, statistics will be classified and analyzed. Then, it comes to the conclusion.

2 Literature Review

2.1 The Previous Study of Short-Memory

A complete memory system is supposed to include sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory. Sensory memory is the first tunnel that all the information enters the brain, a sensory retention of brain’s reflection to external stimuli, which only lasts 0.25~2 seconds and mostly ends up being forgotten while some information is restored due to attention and enters short-term memory. Information will be encoded when turns into short-term memory from sensory memory in acoustic or linguistic form but the retention time is very short. Short-term memory is a processing device or filter before information entering cortex and becoming long-term memory. Long-term memory is the major instrument that brain stores information with a larger span and longer retention time from 1 minute to the whole life-time. 

Miller (1956) pointed out that short-term memory’s span is 7±2 chunks and due to inpidual difference the amount of message is around 5 to 9. As a special language processing activity, interpreting gives more prominence to instantaneity and extemporaneousness. Different from written translation, interpreters are not given enough opportunities to inculcate the messages and listen to them at one time. With the help of note-taking, interpreters are supposed to finish a series of frequently coinstantaneous processing tasks involving message input, temporary memory storage, organizing, expressing and monitoring. Short-term memory plays an important role in the message storage and processing.