125
May 2021
SCIENCE AND EDUCATION
THE IMPORTANCE OF MEMORY IN SIMULTANEOUS TRANSLATION
Shokhrukh Egamberdiev
Organization: Uzbekistan State World
Languages University
Job: professor of UzSWLU
Telephone number: +998907323643
Email adress: egamberdiyev.shohruh_92@mail.ru
Annotation: The purpose of writing this article is to provide information on the types of memory
and the role that memory plays in simultaneous interpretation.
Key words: short-term memory, long-term memory, stages of
simultaneous interpretation,
auditory perception, analysis
Traditionally, memory is divided into short-term and long-term. This division was used in the
“three-component memory model” developed by Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin in 1968 [1].
They put forward the idea that human memory has three components:
Sensory memory. The senses have a limited ability to store almost unprocessed
information about
the world around them for less than a second.
Short-term memory. Our short-term memory is the area where most information is processed.
This is where we organize everything we see and hear and transform the result into meaningful
information, extracting elements from long-term memory as necessary to fill in the gaps. Information
(from one to two to seven (sometimes more) blocks of information) is held here for 15-30 seconds,
which is long enough to be used again.
Long-term memory. Our long-term memory provides long-term storage of information, from a
few minutes to the entire lifetime.
Scientists have different descriptions of the relationship between short-term memory and working,
working memory. Some researchers believe that they are dealing with two different concepts. You can
often find such a classification:
• Short-term memory that stores data for a short period of time (on average about 20 seconds) and
whose volume is 5 - 9
units of information
• Random access memory, which is designed to store information of a larger, predetermined
volume for a period from several seconds to several days.
• Long-term memory capable of storing information for an almost unlimited period
of time with
the possibility of its repeated playback.
Memory and simultaneous interpretation. Memory plays an important role at every stage of the
simultaneous translation process. Proper functioning of short-term memory involves:
◦ word recognition and efficient processing of the information received, if necessary with an appeal
to long-term memory to fill in any gaps;
◦ efficient storage of these information blocks;
◦timely access to this information.
"Weakness" of short-term memory leads to undesirable consequences, some of which may not
be obvious. The most obvious consequence of poor short-term memory is
omissions in interpretation,
such as omission of a qualifier (for example, “rude” instead of “extremely rude”); skipping a subor-
dinate clause; skipping a sentence (or even sentences).
"Approximate" translation is also a consequence of poor short-term memory. In the worst
case, poor short-term memory leads to the fact that the translator allows distortion of information,
"misinterpreting", for example, quantitative data or a description of the details of the process.
Less obvious, but no less serious consequences are revealed when the needs for memory exceed
its capacity. For example, when the source and target languages differ significantly from each other
syntactically, this forces the translator to store a large amount of information in
memory for a long
time before he can reformulate it. This overload of information can lead to the fact that the translator's
memory capacity will not be enough to complete the task. In addition, the higher the information
saturation of the original speech, the more difficult it is for the translator to remember all the blocks
of information.
To eliminate some of these memory problems, as well as to extract more blocks of information
from memory during consecutive or simultaneous translation, interpreters can use cursive writing.
