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Directionality in the decay of memory for words among graduate students of interpretation

Jong-Hwa Won 1

1중앙대학교

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ABSTRACT

Seleskovitch(1978), who founded the Interpretive Theory, suggested interpretation should be meaning-based, and that recall of surface forms in the source text would decay in an interpreter's memory immediately after listening to the source text. In the years since, a number of researchers have argued that surface forms from the source text continue to play a meaningful role during interpretation, and the interpreter's recall of those forms may endure well into the process of interpreting. This paper aims to investigate whether individual words, one of important components of the surface forms, remain in the memory of Korean-English interpreters when they perform consecutive interpreting as well as when they are just listening to a text. In order to investigate this, an experiment was conducted with 8 graduate students of interpretation. The participants were instructed to recall the texts verbatim either after listening to texts in Korean or in English or after interpreting the text. The percentage of words recalled was calculated and their significance was checked with the chi square test. Interesting conclusions were drawn from the investigation: when the participants just listened and recalled, the percentage of Korean words recalled were greater than English. When they did the interpreting, however, the number of English words recalled was greater, which means that the interpreters hold on to the English words, their B language, more strongly when they do interpreting compared to when they are just listening. The current author divided the participants into two groups, one who were brought up and educated in an English-speaking country for 9 to 13 years and a second group who had never been abroad before the age of 20. The latter group demonstrated the strongest tendency to hold on to words in their memory when they did English into Korean interpreting, even greater than when they just listened and recalled words.

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