1.1 Research Purpose and Motivation The purpose of the current book is to investigate one of the most controversial issues in the existing literature, namely determining whether the dominant route in English–Chinese (E–C) and Chinese–English (C–E) professional consecutive inter pretations is the form-based processing route or the meaning-based processing route, and to examine the reasons for the adoption of the dominant route in the brains of the consecutive interpreters. The motivations for this study can be summarized as follows: First, over approximately thepastthreedecades,therehasbeensignificantinterest in the translation processes that take place in a translator’s or an interpreter’s brain when transferring the source text (ST) in the source language (SL) to the target text (TT) in the target language (TL). Efforts have been made to investigate the dominant tendency of two routes (see more in Sect. 1.2.2), namely the form-based and the meaning-based processing routes, using either naturalistic or experimental data within and outside of the field of translation/interpreting studies. The language pairs involved such European languages as Spanish, Danish, Italian, and English. Some scholars have found that the form-based route was dominant in interpreting and translation (e.g., Chou et al., 2016;Dam,1998, 2001), while others have found exactly the opposite; that is, the meaning-based route is dominant (e.g., Fabbro et al., 1990;Ge,2011; Gran, 1989; Gran & Bellini, 1996). These conflicting findings triggered my initial interest in the further investigation of the issue by expanding the research into the area of consecutive interpreting (CI), and exploring the tendencies in interpreting involving Chinese and English.
