An Application Of Strategies Of Short-term Memory In Tourist Interpreting

Tourism is the largest cultural service industry, promoting the boom of tourist interpreting.Tourist interpreting belongs to escort-liaison interpreting. The note-free form with a wide spectrum of knowledge poses a great challenge to the interpreter which indicates that the strategies to increase the capacity of short-term memory should be applied.In recent years, the Zhao Mausoleum has been a cultural site worth going the most for foreign tourists in Shenyang. The author of this report is invited to interpret for this tour by an overseas student to visit the Zhao Mausoleum. And this report is based on this tourist interpreting practice.This practice presents the problems such as massive information, literary descriptive expression and loose organization of spoken language to the short-term memory. From the perspective of deverbalization, it is analyzed that the interpreter should seize the sense or meaning conveyed through the context rather than every single word or the structure of source language. And during the interpreting process, it is not mechanical memory but a dynamic process including information analysis, processing and encoding. Three strategies to process the information are used to improve the short-term memory capacity. They are semantic memory strategy, information visualization strategy and information reorganization strategy.In conclusion, although the memory capacity is limited, information processing and encoding make it possible for the interpreter to efficiently deal with massive information in a limited time.