Momentary engagement in simultaneous versus consecutive interpreting: through the lens of translanguaging and CDST

Abstract

Through the lens of translanguaging theory and the complex, dynamic system theory (CDST) approach, the interpreting process is considered a highly complex and dynamic activity that engages the interpreter’s cognition, emotion, and action during successive “translanguaging moments” of meaning-making. Meanwhile, the two dominant types of interpreting, namely, simultaneous interpreting, and consecutive interpreting are assumed to entail distinct time sensitivity and consume different amounts of cognitive resources at different stages. Based on these assumptions, the present study analyzes interpreters’ momentary engagement during the distinct workflow tasks associated with these two modes of interpreting, with a view to probing their underlying non-linearity, self-organization and emergence dynamics from a micro-level perspective. Furthermore, we triangulated the textual description with multimodal transcription to portray these “translanguaging moments,” which are augmented with a follow-up emotional survey that corroborated our findings.

Delving Into the Influence of Visual Input on the Load-Related Silent Pauses During SI: What About Gestures?

“…The results indicate the interpreter benefits from the visual input, with significantly shorter pause duration compared with the control group, implying also the positive cognitive influence of lip movements. Previous studies on different language pairs such as German and English (Rennert, 2008) and Greek and English (Gieshoff, 2018), and to the best knowledge of the author, little research has been conducted concerning the Portuguese-Chinese language pair about the synergy between visual inputs and cognitive load, except the most recent one about the moment analysis by Han et al (2023) in light of translanguaging theory and of the complex, dynamic system theory (CDST) approach, which focused on the process of interpreting, examining the workflow tasks of CI and SI. However, our present study is both process-and product-oriented, aiming to bridge the gap in academia, by further exploring the influence of visual input on the load-related disfluent performance during SI by delving into the silent pauses.…”