Which is more costly in Chinese to English simultaneous interpreting, “pairing” or “transphrasing”? Evidence from an fNIRS neuroimaging study

Abstract

This study examined the neural mechanism underlying two translation strategies associated with Chinese to English simultaneous interpreting (SI) targeting the left prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is generally involved in the control of interference and conflict resolution and has been identified as the brain area that plays a pivotal role in SI. Brain activation associated with the two strategies including "pairing" and "transphrasing" were compared with that from "nontranslation," which keeps the source language item unchanged in the target language production and is considered as a tactic that does not require complex cognitive operation associated with bilingual processing effort. Our findings revealed that "pairing" elicited the strongest and almost immediate brain activation in the Broca's area, and "transphrasing" resulted in the most extensive and strongest activation overall in the left PFC. By contrast, "nontranslation" induced very little brain activation in these regions. This work, which represents one of the first efforts in investigating brain activation related to translation strategies involving different levels of cognitive control, will not only pave a new avenue for better understanding of the cognitive mechanism underlying SI but also provide further insight into the role that the Broca's region plays in domain-general cognitive control.

Combining robust level extraction and unsupervised adaptive classification for high-accuracy fNIRS-BCI: An evidence on single-trial differentiation between mentally arithmetic- and singing-tasks

“…Slow changes and shifts in the size and center of activation regions over time were observed in the dynamic brain activation map of motor and auditory cortical regions, respectively. A similar phenomenon was observed in the dynamic brain activation maps of pairing and transphrasing stimuli in Lin et al's study of fNIRS-based Chinese-English simultaneous interpretation (Lin et al, 2018 ). These changes in neural activation patterns were also studied in simulations by Li et al ( 2017 ).…”

Mapping translation process research: A bibliographic study on special issues since year 2005

“…Over the last decade, scholars in translation studies as well as from other fields have applied the above-mentioned cross-disciplinary theories and methodologies to investigate translation processes. Recent efforts have been invested to such topics related to TPR as cognitive effort (Lin et al, 2018), attention or working memory (Kosma, 2007), emotion (Hubscher-Davidson, 2018), creativity (Cho, 2006), and translation competence (Sickinger, 2017), to name just a few. TPR has seen an upsurge over time, as evidenced by numerous publications in various forms (e.g., monographs, edited books, and journal articles Sun and Xiao, 2019).…”

Task-Modulated Oscillation Differences in Auditory and Spoken Chinese-English Bilingual Processing: An Electroencephalography Study

“…Although it has been suggested that investigating the neural mechanisms of interpreting would benefit the area of neurolinguistics as a whole ( García, 2013 ), these remain scarcely investigated. Of the existing neurolinguistic research on interpreting, the majority are localization studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging ( Lehtonen et al, 2005 ; Elmer, 2016 ; Elmer et al, 2014 ; Hervais-Adelman et al, 2015a , b , 2017 ; Zheng et al, 2020 ), positron emission tomography ( Klein et al, 1995 ; Price et al, 1999 ; Rinne et al, 2000 ; Tommola et al, 2000 ), functional near-infrared spectroscopy ( Quaresima et al, 2002 ; Lin et al, 2018a , b ; Ren et al, 2019 ), and diffusion tensor imaging ( Van de Putte et al, 2018 ). Though findings vary, brain structures that have been consistently identified as being involved in interpreting include the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, pars triangularis and supramarginal gyrus.…”