tugas

Cognitive Approaches to the Interpreting Process

Initially, research on interpreting processes was done by cognitive psychologists and psycholinguists interested in the simultaneous processing task of listening, interpreting, and speaking. While much of the research had been experimental, some of the more recent research has used conference interpreters as they worked, all of which has focused on interpreter error in order to locate cognitive breakdowns which highlight information processing stages (Cokely 1984; Gerver 1974; Lambert 1983; Moser-Mercer 1978).

Gerver (1976) summarized the research he surveyed by suggesting that a model based on theories about human information processing, with particular attention, be adapted to represent the cognitive processes involved in simultaneous interpreting. Then he outlined a model with two caveats: one, that the flow chart of human information processing “refers only briefly to the processes involved in decoding the source language message and its subsequent encoding in the target language,” and the other, that the model is essentially psychological rather than a linguistic description of simultaneous interpretation”(1976:196).

He concluded with a warning that this kind of model is only a first approximation and that further analysis of situational, personal, and linguistic factors is needed. As he clearly indicates in his summary,”Professional interpreters might, for instance, object that failing to take into account such nonverbal factors as the presence or absence of the actual source language speaker, or an audience diminishes the value of conclusions based on experimental findings”(1976:202).

Moser-Mercer (1978) elaborated on Gerver’s model by further expanding the stages of cognitive activities involved in understanding and producing language. Both of these models attempt to define the interpreter’s organization and access of syntactic and semantic information.

Moving away from translation theories   based on contrastive linguistics, seleskovitch, a teacher of conference interpreters in France, also moved toward psycholinguistics for explanation of how interpreters should not be focusing on word-level equivalents but rather on the sense that a text conveys. She wrote,”The sensing of what is meant as opposed to knowing a language as such is the very foundation of interpretation”(1977:28). She argued that interpreters should renders  the sense of a message or idea through a three-step process of understanding, visualizing, and re-creating the message in the target language.

Cokely (1984) argued that these models are information processing models that view the interpreting process as concerned primarily interpreter mediates between two individuals and communities as well as mediating between two languages”(1984:10). Cokely’s model a psycholinguistic model of the cognitive stages of processing, was produced from analyzing the miscues (errors) of six interpreters who interpreted for speaker giving lectures at a conference. Cokely produced a taxonomy of the major cognitive stages of an interpreting process: message perception, preliminary processing, short term message retention, tactic message formulation, and message production.

The first communicative model of simultaneous interpreting was developed by Ingram (1974). In this early model, the interpreter is represented as a channel in a communication-binding context with a source and a receiver. Ingram (1985) revised his earlier model to include the multicode, multichannel nature of interpreting as a complex semiotic process. In this model, the interpreter must decode, transfer, and recode “ a multiplicity of messages in a multiplicity of interwoven codes with every single act of interpretation”(1985:111). Ingram’s work pointed the way toward the notion of multiple ways in which meaning is communicated and the need to uncover such complex possibilities.