Abstract
Abstract In the current study we set out to investigate source language interference in the visual modality (in sight translation – ST) and in the auditory modality (in simultaneous interpreting – SI). We probed interpretations of cognates, interlingual homographs and passive structures in single sentence contexts as performed from English to Polish by 47 advanced interpreting trainees. We also analysed temporal measures: ear-voice span (in SI) or eye-voice span (in ST) as well as total translation time. The results showed a higher level of interference in ST in the case of homographs and a mixed pattern of results for the remaining measures. We also obtained interesting task-independent results, namely an 80% rate of global passive retention testifying to a high level of syntactic priming in both modes of interpreting. We discuss these results in the context of different types of interference occurring in interpreting and conclude that there might be a similar global level of interference in the two tasks, however with differing underlying patterns. This is the first study to date to directly compare interference levels between ST and SI in such controlled conditions. Our results contribute to the understanding of complex linguistic processes occurring across modalities in interpreting tasks.
Highlights
Conference interpreters routinely engage in multitasking carried out in a bilingual or multilingual context
We first removed all the instances of missing translations of the experimental items. We removed those translations of cognates and homographs that did not involve cognate/homograph or non-cognate/non-homograph equivalents
Over two-thirds of these removed observations were from the simultaneous interpreting task, which testifies to high cognitive load triggered by this type of interpreting
Summary
Conference interpreters routinely engage in multitasking carried out in a bilingual or multilingual context. 188 Agnieszka Chmiel, Przemysław Janikowski and Anna Cieślewicz constantly suppress the activation from the source language input while producing the target language message. The interpreter produces interpretese (Shlesinger 2008), a target language utterance tainted with source language forms through cross-linguistic interference. Due to the multitasking and multimodality involved in interpreting practice, interpreters have to cope with ‘resource demand interference’, i.e. interference from one task while performing another task due to the competition for limited cognitive resources (Wickens 2002; Seeber 2011). As is the case in all tasks in which expertise can be developed, the amount of such interference can be decreased by at least partial automatisation of the simpler sub-processes involved (Strobach & Schubert 2017)
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