The structuring of topical information in a simultaneous interpreter's utterance comprehension

Abstract

Through the qualitative analysis of a transcript from an English-Japanese simultaneous interpreting performance, this study explores the actuality of the interpreter's mental operations in utterance comprehension. The transcript prepared for this study is a set of parallel texts, which represents temporal correspondence between the source utterances and the interpreter's translation. This study focuses on how the interpreter structures and retains topical information, and on how she uses it throughout the rest of her performance. The analysis suggests that the interpreter's mental representation is not simply an accumulation of linguistic information received from the source speech, but a complex that can include an implicit structure as a result of cognitive operations such as pragmatic inferences and the construction of mental models.