ACCESSIBILITY ASSESSMENT AT RE-CODING STAGE
DURING SIMULTANEOUS INTERPRETING
Minamitsu Yoshihiro
Kobe City University of Foreign Studies, Japan
yminamitsu@hcc1.bai.ne.jp
The purpose of this paper is to design a rough picture of the re-coding stage, or rendering stage during
simultaneous interpreting (SI). The re-coding stag, in our mode, is divided into two processes: (a)
searching a translational word process and (b) identifying it process. In this argument, we focus our
attention on (a) side, and we claim that the notion of accessibility plays the essential role in the process by
using live SI data.
In principle, the simultaneous interpreter is asked faithfully, not truthfully, to render what the original
speaker communicates in source language (SL). Because it has been widely acknowledged that explicit
semantic equivalence across language is not possible and insufficient. The interpreter, however, has to
recover what the original speaker means, or the message, which is explicitly and implicitly mentioned in
the SL, but whose existence can be denoted by inferring from it. The central problem which SI theorists
tackle is how to picture the entire SI process in detail. Although enormous attempts have been made,
namely from cognitive account, its process is still controversial. Because the simultaneous interpreter
concurrently performs the tasks mentioned above: monitoring, storing and encoding. From another point
of view, information flow during SI must be complex. For example it is not always that information flows
forward as time goes on, sometimes it is stored the case in which the interpreter is unable to identify the
grammatical feature of the relevant information. These complexities still barrier for theorists in designing
the SI processing model in detail.
The following discussion, we first consider the cognitive approach to SI, and point out how the re-coding
involving translation process actually takes place, in other words the mechanism of how syntactic and
lexical information is retrieved from memory and used in language production, remains unclear. And we
discuss briefly the previous research on the linguistic approach to SI. There we will single out the two
important approaches: cohesion and coherence based approach and metarepresentational approach, and
point out problems of these approaches. Then, we introduce the notion of accessibility that plays the
essential role in this argument and exemplify its availability by scrutiny of live English-to-Japanese SI
data.
In sum, we reconfirmed that ear-voice span (EVS) sheds only partial light on to the information flow in SI
process. Then we argues that the interpreter’s cognitive load deserves careful attention, and that As the
crucial feature of the notion of accessibility, we argue that it overlaps the interpreter’s attention control,
and the more it could be divided into the four factors that interact with the memory components.
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