This study sets out to describe simultaneous interpreters' attention-sharing initiatives when exposed under input from both videotaped speech recording and real-time transcriptions. Separation of mental energy in acquiring visual input accords with the human brain's statistic optimization principle where the same property of an object is presented through diverse fashions. In examining professional interpreters' initiatives, the authors invited five professional English-Chinese conference interpreters to simultaneously interpret a videotaped speech with real-time captions generated by speech recognition engine while meanwhile monitoring their eye movements. The results indicate the professional interpreters' preferences in referring to visually presented captions along with the speaker's facial expressions, where low-frequency words, proper names, and numbers gained greater attention than words with higher frequency. This phenomenon might be explained by the working memory theory in which the central executive enables redundancy gains retrieved from dual-channel information.

This research aims to account for readers’ perception of second-person pronouns and to test their effectiveness in enhancing reader memory in English-Chinese advertisement translation. We conducted an experiment in which 62 participants read the Chinese translations of 16 previously unseen English print advertisements. Two parallel Chinese versions were prepared for the experiment, one with second-person reference and the other without. The participants were first asked to read the translations and indicate which version they liked better. Two weeks later, they were divided into two groups and asked to rate their memory of the two Chinese versions. Statistical analysis shows that the ratings of the second-person version are significantly higher, which implies that second-person reference is effective in enhancing the participants’ memory.