Language and Thought: Effect of Translation vs Interpretation

Two experiments tested the following hypothesis: translation which proceeds from surface structure to surface structure causes greater interference than delayed interpretation across languages which stores the ideas in deep memory and expresses them later in the target language. Thirty English-speaking students rendered a Spanish text into English. Half :of them translated it with text in view and 24 hours later wrote it from memory. The other half wrote it 24 hours after studying it. The immediate translations showed significantly more problems than the delayed recall versions.