Which is more costly in Chinese to English simultaneous interpreting, “pairing” or “transphrasing”? Evidence from an fNIRS neuroimaging study

Xiaohong Lin; Victoria Lai Cheng Lei; Defeng Li; Zhen Yuan

doi:10.1117/1.NPh.5.2.025010

5 June 2018 Which is more costly in Chinese to English simultaneous interpreting, “pairing” or “transphrasing”? Evidence from an fNIRS neuroimaging study

Xiaohong Lin, Victoria Lai Cheng Lei, Defeng Li, Zhen Yuan

Author Affiliations +

Neurophotonics, Vol. 5, Issue 2, 025010 (June 2018). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.NPh.5.2.025010

Abstract

This study examined the neural mechanism underlying two translation strategies associated with Chinese to English simultaneous interpreting (SI) targeting the left prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is generally involved in the control of interference and conflict resolution and has been identified as the brain area that plays a pivotal role in SI. Brain activation associated with the two strategies including “pairing” and “transphrasing” were compared with that from “nontranslation,” which keeps the source language item unchanged in the target language production and is considered as a tactic that does not require complex cognitive operation associated with bilingual processing effort. Our findings revealed that “pairing” elicited the strongest and almost immediate brain activation in the Broca’s area, and “transphrasing” resulted in the most extensive and strongest activation overall in the left PFC. By contrast, “nontranslation” induced very little brain activation in these regions. This work, which represents one of the first efforts in investigating brain activation related to translation strategies involving different levels of cognitive control, will not only pave a new avenue for better understanding of the cognitive mechanism underlying SI but also provide further insight into the role that the Broca’s region plays in domain-general cognitive control.

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Xiaohong Lin, Victoria Lai Cheng Lei, Defeng Li, and Zhen Yuan "Which is more costly in Chinese to English simultaneous interpreting, “pairing” or “transphrasing”? Evidence from an fNIRS neuroimaging study," Neurophotonics 5(2), 025010 (5 June 2018). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.NPh.5.2.025010

Received: 29 November 2017; Accepted: 11 May 2018; Published: 5 June 2018

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