1.1 INTRODUCTION There are two broad fields of investigation in translation studies: written translation and interpreting. Written translation research is mainly concerned with the transfer of meaning from the source language into the target lan guage, with the medium being the written form, while simultaneous inter preting (SI) focuses on the transfer of meaning from the source language into the target language, with the medium being the oral form (if signed language interpreting is excluded). But there are two important facts that need to be stated. First, despite sharing some processes and strategies with written translation, simultaneous interpreting has its scholarly peculiarities, for, as Garzone and Viezzi (2002, p. 2) opine, simultaneous interpreting studies ‘rely on accurately defined methodologies borrowed from the linguistic sciences, which in turn have witnessed some important evolutions, looking beyond grammatical well-formedness to include semantic, pragmatic and rhetorical aspects’. Second, written translation processes have received due attention, but little is known about the simultaneous interpreting processes despite some efforts that started in the 1960s. Several studies have been made on how humans deal with written transla tion problems in the last two decades. A much-quoted study is Bell’s (1991) which views the act of translating as based on problem-solving. In a tenta tive model of text-processing during translating, he maintains that there are five stages involved in text-processing: (a) linear sequence and grammatical structures; (b) propositions; (c) sequencing; (d) main ideas; and (e) plans and goals. Séguinot (1995), however, attempts a shift to a different gear; she investigates the causes of the errors made by translators, whether profession als or novices. She discusses the problem in terms of two broad headings: errors and the individual translator and first and second language. She tackles factors like limitations on processing capacity, parallel processing and for wards processing, accessing knowledge and motor aspects of production. She states that human comprehension is non-linear (pace Bell, 1991) as it is based on predictions. Dancette (1996) attempts to reconcile the two rival positions of the linguistic and the cognitive. While the linguistic model captures mean ing through ‘the componentiality of different linguistic structures’, the cogni tive view makes use of the mental model to explain language comprehension. Other paths of written translation research only focus on cognitive notions such as schemas and domains in translation. Olohan’s paper (2000) attempts an investigation of domain conceptualization and scene construal in trainee translators. He maintains that L2/L1 mapping may occur during translating in the form of routines of frequently translated forms. In the case of experienced translators, conceptual structures can be evoked to provide a context rather than linguistic ones. To select but a few studies based on such cognition grounded approaches, Al-Kufaishi (2004) and Kaur (2005) introduce the macro-skills of translation, which include among others the following: 1. Recognizing explicit and implicit semantic elements. 2. Identifying the rhetorical functions the writer has selected. 3. Understanding relations within the sentence, for example, premodifica tion, postmodification, disjuncts and the like. 4. Using mental imagery. 5. Reading and comprehension. 6. Analyzing and reasoning – translating. 7. Choosing equivalent terms based on context and culture. 8. Selective attention – attending to one sentence at a time. Despite the similarity between some of the strategies and processes involved in written translation and simultaneous interpreting (cf. Warner, 1997; Bajo et al., 2000; Lambert, 2004), the latter is yet to receive much scholarly attention due to the ‘extra-linguistic’ elements involved. As Setton (2005) notes: The question of why simultaneous interpreting merits our interest needs to be asked a priori because after sixty years of providing a vital daily service to the international community, the activity remains an arcane field of study. This status of the discipline is probably due in equal parts to the occult, not- quite-respectable odour of translation generally, and to the extreme difficulty of capturing SI for research. (p. 70)
