This study aims to identify the appropriate length of original speech per segment of consecutive interpretation from English to Japanese. It is customary in Europe for an original utterance to continue for about five minutes before interpretation starts. While this duration is believed to be much shorter in Japan, there is no consensus in practice or education based on scientific evidence. The longer the segment interpreters must listen to at one time, the greater the memory burden and harder it will be to remember the content. This could result in errors such as omission or substitution. To investigate how the burden on interpreters’ memory affects the precision of interpretation, an experiment on consecutive interpretation was conducted using segments of three different lengths: 1, 2.5, and 5 minutes. The results indicate that errors proportionately increase with the length of the segment.

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This study investigated on the tendency of Japanese-Chinese translation for the expression at the end of web’s news headlines, using the samples of NHK website which is an official media owned by the Japanese government. The study focused on three types of expressions ending with Noun, Particle and Verb. The result showed that in the news headlines about 50 percent of sentence end expressions were appropriately translated into Chinese headlines, and the other were rewrote by using different verb or simply omitted. It is argued that Chinese headlines tend to emphasis on conveying results of news’ contents, and often use a form of predicate wording.

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This study aims to analyze explicitation strategies in Japanese-Vietnamese interpretation from the point of view of directions and modes of interpreting. The informants in this study were eight interpreters who had both more than five years of experience in consecutive interpreting, and previous experience in simultaneous interpreting. The explicitation strategies identified in the data were classified into six types: 1) Restoration of omissions; 2) Subdivision of sentences; 3) Use of conjunctions, adverbs; 4) Addition of information; 5) Explicitation of referents; 6) Explicitation of proper nouns. The differences in the tendency of usage of explicitation strategies can be explained by the features of the Japanese and Vietnamese languages, differences between the two cultures, and modes of interpreting.

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Linguistic differences between languages and interpreting process affect phrasing in translated language. This phenomenon may lead to a critical issue in court interpreting, which requires higher accuracy and trueness above any other type of interpreting. In this study, the author focused on the negative question form frequently used in cross examinations and conducted a survey among the interpreters regarding translation of Japanese negative question sentences into Chinese, Korean, English and Filipino (Tagalog). The study examined the aforementioned issue from a view point of; (1) the scope of the source language which is translated into a negative question, (2) translation of its response, and (3) ease or difficulty of translation.

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This article focuses on the nature of non-linguistic mental representations constructed by simultaneous interpreters drawing on the conceptual complex (CC) model originally introduced by Funayama (e.g. 2005, 2007). While processing source text, two types of mental representations are considered relevant: linguistic and conceptual representations. Conceptual representations remain longer in the interpreter’s mind than linguistic ones, facilitating the processing of source text and the production of target text. Although conceptual representations develop incrementally, they keep their identity during discourse processing. Consequently, some of their features remain unaltered, while others change. The conceptual skeleton is identified as the solid part of non-linguistic representations. Analysing linguistic differences found between source and target text as recorded during simultaneous interpreting, this study elucidates the nature of the skeleton, describes the consistency and liquidity of conceptual representations as a whole, and explores how they develop based on the skeleton and their role in the interpreting performance.

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The objective of this paper is to theoretically explore conference interpreting as a social practice, specifically employing Bourdieu’s theory of practice and drawing on my application of his notions of field, habitus, and capital (Bourdieu, 1977; 1990b) reinforced by the voices of the second cultural turn in sociology. It proposes a theoretical framework with which to analyse conference interpreting as a socially-situated activity and interpreters as agents endowed with a specific quantity of resources and competences uniquely acquired in particular contexts of training and enacted with agency in the context of interpreting performances. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the theoretical rationale of sociological research in interpreting to posit the construction of its object as a whole and fill the gap deriving from its partial conceptualization. On this basis, it calls for future empirical works and methodological debates in the flourishing field of the sociology of interpreting.

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The Chinese literature (in this paper, novel) written between 1976 and 1989 is termed, in academia, as “China’s New-period Literature”. According to statistics, no less than 659 pieces of China’s new-period literature were translated and published in Japan, among which 108 pieces were published between 1978 and 1986 while 412 pieces were published in later years between 1987 and 1995. Hence, these two periods of time are referred to as the early and golden ages of the translation of China’s new-period literature in Japan. In this paper, the paradigm of DTS (Descriptive Translation Studies) is adopted to analyze the differences in the translated versions’ publication forms and translators’ professions between these two periods of time. The conclusion of this analysis will contribute to revealing and clarifying the relationship between the translation of China’s new-period literature and the social context in Japan.

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There has been a fervent debate concerning the idea that shadowing is merely a monolingual repetition of verbal output, rather than being a useful tool for enhancing content-processing capacity (Pöchhacker, 2004/2016). However, few studies have explicitly examined how a shadowing task can contribute to consecutive interpreting according to effectiveness evaluations based on empirical data. The present study aims to identify the most frequent incidences prompting disruptions in shadowing and to assess its correlation with the accuracy of source text interpretation. For this purpose, this study utilized data from 56 participants who took shadowing tests and the subsequently conducted English-Japanese consecutive interpreting tests in the interpreting courses at a Japanese university. Then the variability of the efficacy of shadowing was investigated. The results demonstrated a positive effect of shadowing on the group that administered intensive shadowing treatment while some provocative findings were also ascertained. Thus, this study elucidates the true nature of a shadowing activity.

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