I returned from Bydgoszcz where I was invited by Dr. John Kearns to give a guest talk entitled “Unveiling the secrets of conference interpreters’ booths and notepads” at Kazimierz Wielki University. I presented results of two studies - one involving cooperation between simultaneous interpreters in the booth and the other about the efficiency of teaching note-taking to interpreting trainees.

I gave a talk today at the PSYCHOLinguistic Reading Group at the School of English (IFA). Here’s the abstract:

Applying psycholinguistic research methods to Interpreting Studies

This presentation is addressed to participants of my COGSIMO post-doc project and all students interested in psycholinguistic methodology. The focus will be on experimental design and procedures on the example of three empirical studies: a cross-linguistic semantic priming experiment involving a lexical decision task, a word translation study and a self-paced mouse-driven Automated Reading Span (RSPAN) task to measure Working Memory capacity. All studies were conducted with the use of E-Prime and the Serial Response Box to collect reaction times. I will also briefly mention the rationale behind using such methods in Interpreting Studies and a possible synergy effect between psycholinguistics and research on conference interpreting.

My article entitled: “Episodic and semantic memory as sources of background knowledge in conference interpreting” has just been published in Translation Studies in the New Millennium - An International Journal of Translation and Interpreting (Vol. 7 dated 2009 but appearing just now). Here’s the abstract:

Conference interpreters tap into various memory systems to support information processing required during their work. A lot of research has been devoted to the role of working memory in interpreting, but few scholars have comprehensively incorporated long-term memory into their models. This paper focuses on the application of declarative long-term (episodic and semantic) memory in interpreting. It presents the role of both memory systems in lexical processing and posits that episodic memory may store specific engrams, called interpreting tags, based on interpreters’ personal experience and later used as additional information that supports information processing in interpreting. Various examples of such tags are discussed based on a qualitative introspective survey among professional interpreters.