Investigating Strategic Cognitive Behavior In Simultaneous Interpreting of Collocation

Abstract

Simultaneous interpreting is regarded as a complex task as it entails comprehension of the source language, storage at the short-term memory and reproduction of the message according to target language norms. During SI, many concurrent cognitive processes take place to reflect the complex and demanding characteristics of the task. Due to this complexity, SI cause various problems for interpreters in all discourse levels which require online strategies to overcome these problems. The interpretation of collocations as being language-specific elements is considered among the major problems interpreters encounter during the interpreting task. The study aims at identifying the strategies applied by professional and student interpreters as well as studying the effect of directionality during rendering collocations in English-Arabic-English SI tasks. The study hypothesizes that collocations do not need much cognitive efforts if the interpreter is well acquainted with a great deal of them. Otherwise, s/he is very likely to face some difficulties and problems in translating them. The study is qualitatively analyzed according to Seleskovitch (1968) model which considers the transference of meaning is the interpreter’s main concern rather than transferring the linguistic elements between SL and TL. It also used Lörscher’s (1991) model to identify the strategies and the percentage of each strategy that was applied by the participants. The analysis showed that professionals were able to provide adequate renderings for collocations as they are ready made chunks that do not require great processing effort. Moreover, they used their experience and knowledge to apply the strategy of inference which was mainly used to derive the meaning of the collocation from the context while studentsresorted to literal translation and omitting the collocations which have negative effects on the their performance and consequently led to distort the process of interpreting.