Self-monitoring processes in simultaneous interpreting

Abstract

Abstract In psycholinguistics there is an agreement that self-monitoring is part of the speech production system, it serves the repair of speech errors and disfluencies occurring during the process of speech production. During simultaneous interpreting, where source language speech perception and target language speech production happen simultaneously, the analysis of self-monitoring is of particular importance. In our study we compare self-monitoring processes in the target language texts, interpreted from English into Hungarian, of professional interpreters and trainee interpreters. We examine the frequency of incidence of error – type disfluencies, the editing phase of self-repairs, the frequency of incidence of disfluencies, and the editing phases of repetitions and restarts. Although our data have revealed considerable individual differences between interpreters, some tendencies can be detected. In general, differences can be detected in self-monitoring between professional and trainee interpreters. When compared to data about self-monitoring processes in spontaneous, monolingual Hungarian speech, we can state that there were far fewer phenomena connected to self-monitoring in the target language output of simultaneous interpreters than in monolingual Hungarian texts.