Interpreting as Communicative and Sociocultural Interaction

Since the 1960s, interpreting has often been investigated from the cognitive approach. Cognitive processing has always been a major focus in interpreting studies. To experimental psychologists, cognitive psychologists, and psycholinguists, interpreting offers many fascinating elements that an object of study can provide: it is bilingual processing, in which the interpreter performs language comprehension and language production in real time; it is also extreme language processing because both comprehension and production have to be completed immediately due to the time constraints in interpreting; and the process is natural and authentic to an extent that few artificial experiments can simulate. Even in recent years when the computer has become smarter with artificial intelligence, people would still wonder at the “amazing brains of the real-time interpreters.” As a BBC Future special column journalist observed in his article, “The world’s most powerful computers can’t perform accurate real-time interpreting of one language to another. Yet human interpreters do it with ease. [. . .] Executing it required versatility and nuance beyond the reach of the most powerful computers. It is a wonder that her brain, indeed any human brain, can do it at all” (Watts 2014)....