earticle

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This is a follow-up study of Chung (2014) on interpreters’ memory. On the basis of her observation, Chung (2014) maintained that interpreters tend to retain linguistic forms (numbers, proper names, etc.) better than non-interpreters, only if these are embedded in context. We administered a text memory task to four groups of different interpreting experience and ages (professional interpreters, school teachers, interpreter trainees, undergraduate students) in order to put this hypothesis to the test. Not only in retrieving the linguistic forms but also in remembering the context around them, expert interpreters as well as interpreter trainees yielded the best results (statistically significant). Both groups were good at dividing (or switching) their attention into (or between) linguistic form and meaning so that they were able to keep both sets of information safely. School teachers who had a comparable educational background and experience with texts as expert interpreters sometimes showed even poorer results than student groups. It might owe to the fact that interpreters had a well-developed attention system, because interpreting, in nature, requires a multitasking ability. Age, on the other hand, seems to have played only a subordinate role. Expert interpreters, the second oldest group did well throughout the test, whereas the undergraduate students often yielded the poorest results.