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In:Psycholinguistic and Cognitive Inquiries into Translation and Interpreting
Edited by Aline Ferreira and John W. Schwieter
[Benjamins Translation Library 115] 2015
► pp. 41–64

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The contributions of cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics to conference interpreting

A critical analysis

 | École Supérieure d’Interprètes et de Traducteurs, Université Paris 3
Published online: 22 January 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.115.03gil
Research in conference interpreting started with exploratory experiments by psychologists, but interpreting practitioners soon took over, excluding their theories and methods and replacing them with intuition and introspection-based inferences from observation. In the 1990s, cognitive science became a major reference for concepts and theories again. It has remained in that position ever since. The experimental paradigm which prevails in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics is difficult to apply in interpreting research where inter-individual variability is high, recruiting multiple large samples for controlled experiments is problematic, and so is the selection and measurement of quantifiable indicators as dependent variables. Cognitive theory-based explanations of interpreting, including several popular models, were developed by interpreting practitioners, but have not been tested to a sufficient extent to corroborate or falsify them. Advances in the understanding of interpreting cognition have been mostly based on theory rather than on empirical hypothesis testing. As more interpreting practitioners seek systematic training in cognitive science and more tools and technology become available, gaze and pupil analyzers being a case in point, psychology and psycholinguistics may become more effective in providing direct answers to questions about interpreting.
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