Is working memory working in consecutive interpreting

It is generally agreed that language interpreting is cognitively demanding; however, to date there is little evidence to indicate how working memory is involved in the task, perhaps due to methodological limitations. Based on a full consideration of key components of interpreting, two series of experiments were conducted to explore how working memory might play a role in discourse and sentence interpreting. If working memory is implicated both in grammatical encoding into the target language, and in temporary storage of the discourse content, then higher demand in one function might compromise the other. Thus discourses that differ in word orders between languages could increase the processing load and leave less resource for memory maintenance, affecting recall performance. In Experiment 1, Chinese-English bilingual participants’ memory performance was compared when they translated passages from Chinese to English and from English to Chinese, where the expected word order was either congruent or incongruent between source and target. Recall was not sensitive to word order or direction of translation. Perhaps surprisingly, memory for incongruent discourses was numerically better than that for congruent sentences. Experiment 2 showed that interpreting trainees performed just like the participants in Experiment 1 did, suggesting that memory performance was not modulated by translation direction in proficient translators. Experiment 3 explored the relationship between surface form transformation and recall. As discourse paraphrasing did not result in better recall than verbatim recall, it was concluded that the better memory performance for incongruent discourse interpreting suggested by Experiment 1 was not the result of active manipulation of word form or word order in interpreting. Finally, a free recall task among native English speakers showed that the incongruent discourses tested in earlier experiments were intrinsically more memorable than congruent discourses (Experiment 4). Despite this confound, this series of experiments highlighted the importance of comprehension in interpreting, but it did not rule out the role of working memory in the task.