Sentence Memory And Deverbalization

The Interpretive Theory (TIT) is one of the most important schools of thought in thehistory of Interpreting Studies and has far-reaching influences in interpreting training andresearch in China and the rest of the world. The TIT views interpreting as a communicativeactivity as well as a knowledge-based process of making sense rather than transcoding. Itsaccount of interpreting rests on a three-stage model that consists of comprehension,deverbalization and reformation. In the deverbalization stage, interpreters are supposed toforget the surface form of the words and sentences of the original texts and only remembertheir sense or meaning. Deverbalization is widely believed to be a crucial stage for “goodinterpreting” and researchers have done a number of quantitative and qualitative studies onthis process. However, there have been few experimental studies on the subject that, duringor after the deverbalization process, apart from remembering the meaning, can interpretersretain any memory of the surface form?In order to study this subject, the author uses tools from psycholinguistics for testingrecognition memory of sentence surface form and designs an experiment to testinterpreters’ recognition memory of the surface form during English-Chinese simultaneousinterpreting. The experiment consists of an interpreter group of20professional conferenceinterpreters (A language Chinese and B language English) and an alternative group of50first year graduate students (with the same language combination) in a professionaltranslation program. Interpreters and students are asked to simultaneously interpret andlisten to an English speech (16minutes and30seconds) respectively and complete aquestionnaire right after the speech ends where they are asked to look at33originalsentences randomly picked out from the original text and33paraphrased sentences (withthe same meanings as the original sentences but different surface forms). They are thenasked to write down if they believe the sentence they see is a verbatim account of whatthey just heard or a paraphrased sentence by choosing from6options:“No. I’m certain”,“No. I think so”,“No. I guess so”,“Yes. I guess so”,“Yes. I think so” and “Yes. I’mcertain”. Every option is given a score from1to6.The test results are the following: 1. The average score for interpreters in terms of recognition memory for originalsentences is3.522and the average score for students is3.937. The recognition memory ofthe students for the surface form of the original sentences is significantly higher than thatof the interpreters.2. The average score for interpreters in terms of recognition memory for paraphrasedsentences is3.283and the average score for students is2.836. The students’ recognitionmemory of the surface form of the paraphrased sentences is significantly lower than that ofthe interpreters.3. The combined average scores for interpreters and students don’t have anystatistically significant variance and are all around6.8.The experiment shows that, compared with students, professional interpreters haveweaker memories of the surface form of the original sentences and all use the“meaning-based approach” of interpreting. Also, as they need to do more in-depth analysisand processing, interpreters have stronger memories of certain words and sentencestructures and are able to identify more successfully some paraphrased sentences. What’smore, as interpreters and students all have limited attention or processing capacity, theymight do better in either identifying original or paraphrased sentences, but are not able toidentify both kinds with certainty.