Abstract
Abstract This study addresses cognitive aspects of turn-taking and the role of experience in dialogue interpreting, by investigating the temporal and textual properties of the coupled turn (i.e. the original utterance and its interpretation). A comparison was made using a video-recorded scripted role-play between eight interpreters, with Swedish-French or Swedish-Spanish as working languages and with different levels of experience. Cognitively challenging long stretches of talk were introduced in both directions of the working languages and analyzed with a multi-modal approach. We identified a number of quantitative measures, such as the number of coupled turns and the time used. Furthermore, we qualitatively analyzed the types of renditions. The findings suggest that the mean length of time of the coupled turn, which we label processing span, is a measure that is not primarily related to interpreting experience but rather reflects the constraints of the interpreter’s working memory. A further finding is that the inexperienced interpreters have a higher percentage of reduced renditions than the experienced interpreters, and this difference is statistically significant.
Highlights
For the dialogue interpreter, working memory is crucial for the task of perceiving an utterance in one language in order to render it in its entirety into the other language
The cognitive processes of dialogue interpreting have recently come into focus in a number of research studies, which have looked at the gaze of the interpreter (Tiselius & Sneed 2020), the interpreter’s language proficiency (Tiselius & Englund Dimitrova 2019), online self-regulation (Herring 2018), and strategies in dialogue interpreting (Arumí Ribas & Vargas-Urpi 2017)
We are not aware of any experimental studies of working memory based on data from dialogue interpreters, but we find it reasonable to assume that experience from dialogue interpreting gives cognitive advantages, analogous to the findings reported above
Summary
For the dialogue interpreter, working memory is crucial for the task of perceiving an utterance in one language in order to render it in its entirety into the other language This involves a number of complex cognitive operations, including problem solving and monitoring their own memory and cognitive processes (Englund Dimitrova & Tiselius 2016). © John Benjamins Publishing Company cannot off-load working memory, whether by producing the target utterance simultaneously or taking elaborate notes, they need to use other coping strategies. Central to this is turn-taking, that is, the management of taking turns at talk, which is necessary to allow for the interpreter’s processing and as shown by Wadensjö (1998), to coordinate the participants’ interaction. As far as we have been able to ascertain, the cognitive aspects of turn-taking in dialogue interpreting have not yet been investigated
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