Cognitive Processing Routes in Consecutive Interpreting: A Corpus-assisted Approach

This book addresses a controversial issue regarding SL-TL transfer in the translation process, namely the question as to the dominant route in English-Chinese and Chinese-English professional consecutive interpretations, respectively: the form-based processing route or meaning-based processing route. It presents a corpus-assisted product study, in which the interpreting processing patterns of culture-specific items (CSIs) are analyzed. The study reveals that the dominant route in English vs. Chinese consecutive interpreting varies under different circumstances. Four factors are proposed to account for such differences: linguistic variables (e.g., grammatical complexity of the unit), type of CSI, language direction, and extra-linguistic variables (e.g., multilateral or bilateral settings). In summary, the book systematically introduces a corpus-assisted approach to translation process research, which will benefit all readers who are interested in translation process research but cannot employ neuroscientific measures.