A Contrastive Study Of Attention Allocation On English-Chinese Simultaneous Interpreting And On-sight Interpreting

Attention allocation in simultaneous interpreting and its related theories have been attracting enormous attentions from interpretation researchers. According to Gile’s Effort Model, interpretation can only accomplish when different efforts are well coordinated. In his model, there are four efforts, namely listening and analysis effort, production effort, memory effort, and coordination effort. However, in on-sight interpreting, one more effort should be added, that is visual interference effort. With30MTI students from a university as subjects, this research adopts both product-related data and process-related data with an attempt to determine attention allocation differences involved when subjects perform on-sight interpreting compared to simultaneous interpretation, but more specifically whether performance is enhanced or hindered by the visual presentation of the transcript to be interpreted and the added reading effort’s impact on other efforts and the whole interpreting process. Results indicated that on-sight interpreting yielded higher performance scores than simultaneous interpretation, indicating that the added attention of visual exposure to the message to be interpreted, if properly allocated, does not necessarily interfere with a subject’s already overloaded capacity to interpret simultaneously, but that in fact, it may even help the student’s performance. Pedagogically speaking, it is recommended that on-sight interpreting be included in any cognitive approach to a simultaneous-interpreter training program.