Two Tasks are Managed Simultaneously

In a general sense, students have always been told to study with single-hearted devotion. In a particular sense, however, being able to manage two tasks (or multiple tasks) at the same time is the advanced capacity required for carrying out sophisticated missions such as translation, specially simultaneous interpreting.

The biological foundation of the dull-ability lies in attention distribution. While its total capacity is confined, attention can still be distributed as experiments have proved. Cases can be easily found of people possessing the ability to walk while talking on the phone. However, the ability to juggle drive and conduct a telephone conversation is obviously more demanding, depending very much on the contents of conversation and the conditions of traffic.
The complexity of the tasks carried out concurrently determines the quality of attention distribution. Given the fact that most translators engaged in Chinese-English translation are not "bilinguals" in its true sense but "diglossias", the layout of their attention distribution may vary accordingly, virtually taking up more attention from foreign language side.

In daily practice, the drills of "spin and reel at the same time" are often adopted in simultaneous interpreter-trainings, where the trainees' concurrent ability of listening, evaluating, converting and speaking are expected to develop in terms of attention distribution, not evenly but individually.

According to research, certain typical interactions between the speaker and the simultaneous interpreter during an average conference can be viewed as follows,

Speaker speaks Interpreter interprets 42%
Speaker speaks Interpreter silent 18%
Speaker silent Interpreter silent 12%
Speaker silent Interpreter interprets 28%

As a simultaneous interpreter, I have some insights into certain "imbalances" during the interpreting and the efforts to "balance out" the process phase by phase without missing out the main points, which are deemed to be an ideal outcome for an interpreter to achieve.