Abstract
The present paper reports on an experiment in which the use of possessives is investigated in an interpreting task from English to Polish. The English possessive determiner system is neutral with respect to the syntactic position of the antecedent possessor, while Polish distinguishes lexically between locally bound – i.e. reflexive – and non-reflexive possessive modifiers. The interpreter therefore has to ‘compute’ mentally the syntactic position of the antecedent possessor in order to make the correct choice in Polish as the target language. The study shows that this is cognitively a very demanding task in simultaneous interpreting, as many errors as well as self-corrections occur. The study furthermore shows that interpreters adapt their language to their audience, and adequate omissions, as well as correct form of the possessive occur more often when they have a group of engineers in mind than when they interpret for language specialists. We understand this to mean that the cognitive complexity of solving the cross-linguistic asymmetry in the possessive system causes more errors when the interpreter stays closer to the source text in speaking to language specialists.
Highlights
In the process of transferring information from English to Polish, for example, correct choice involves deciding whether the possessive determiner in the source language has a reflexive or a non-reflexive interpretation, depending on the syntactic position of the possessor in the target language
We primarily ask whether there is a priming effect related to possessives in simultaneous interpreting
We aim to verify whether English possessive determiners will be erroneously rendered as non-reflexives in Polish
Summary
Interpreters generally have native-like competence in their two working languages, the question we raise here is whether the already extremely complex task of interpreting in any way affects the processing of possessives when the systems are asymmetric. In the process of transferring information from English to Polish, for example, correct choice involves deciding whether the possessive determiner in the source language has a reflexive or a non-reflexive interpretation, depending on the syntactic position of the possessor (its antecedent) in the target language. Our study investigates possible grammatical transfer in conference interpreters interpreting for different target audiences We consider independent judges’ quality ratings of the interpreters’ production and whether the ratings in any way correlate with grammatical correctness
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