Neuroimaging of simultaneous conference interpreters

Abstract

Conference interpreting demands the coordination of multiple cognitive processes required to attend to a source message, process that source message, convert it to the target language and ultimately produce the target utterance. This chapter focuses on simultaneous (as opposed to consecutive) interpreting, which has the particular demand of requiring attention to be divided between the source and the target, with the concomitant demands this places on resource management. At the heart of this sits the concept of cognitive control. Specifically, the control that must be executed on language processes, attention and motor processes in order to execute a simultaneous interpreting task. This chapter reviews the literature on the neural bases of simultaneous interpreting in order to provide a broad overview of the underlying cerebral systems that are implicated, and their relationships to other cognitive domains. It begins by providing a brief primer on the neural basis of language and multilingual language control, alongside neuroimaging methods. A narrative review of studies that employed neuroimaging to study the neural basis of simultaneous interpreting follows, with a proposal for mapping the published data onto a schematic model of the interpreting process. The chapter concludes with suggestions for avenues of potential future research.