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Prediction is an important part of language processing. An open question is to what extent people predict language in challenging circumstances. Here we tested the limits of prediction by asking bilingual Dutch native speakers to interpret Dutch sentences into their English counterparts. In two visual world experiments, we recorded participants' eye movements to co-present visual objects while they engaged in interpreting tasks (consecutive and simultaneous interpreting). Most participants showed anticipatory eye movements to semantically-related upcoming target words in their L1 source language during both consecutive and simultaneous interpretation. A quarter of participants during simultaneous interpretation however did not move their eyes, an extremely unusual participant behaviour in visual world studies. Overall, the findings suggest that most people predict in the source language under challenging interpreting situations. Further work is required to understand the causes of the absence of (anticipatory) eye movements during simultaneous interpretation in a substantial subset of individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigates the similarities and differences between professional and student interpreters in their use of self-repairs, in terms of form and motivation, and analyzes the impact of expertise on fluency. To this end, a retrospective interview-based Chinese-to-English consecutive interpreting experiment has been carried out, of which the results are as follows. First, both groups adopt repetition, restart, replacement, rephrasing and delayed repair as repair techniques. Second, repair of errors and appropriateness constitute major motivations for self-repair, and repair for output idiomaticity and repair due to errors in the original speech are also observed, enriching the classification of repair motivations in the C-E consecutive interpreting context. Third, in comparison with the student group, the professional interpreters pay more attention to semantic reproduction and are more proficient in syntactic structure conversion, leading to fewer syntactic error repairs and D-repairs in the professional group. The differences in repair models between the two groups can thus be attributed to their varying capabilities in processing syntactic structures and semantic representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lexical simplification parameters, labeled as representative of the cognitive load in various processes, have been applied in corpus-based studies on translation universals and interpreting outputs. We speculate that the output of simultaneous interpreting (SI), the extreme situation of language control, might be more simplified than that of consecutive interpreting (CI) due to the high cognitive load. To test this hypothesis, the present study examines the simplification patterns of rendered texts, based on a corpus composed of SI and CI output texts, read-out translated speeches and non-interpreted, original English speeches in three dimensions: information density, lexical repetitiveness and lexical sophistication. The results demonstrate that all of the parameters apply more to CI than to SI, indicating that the CI output is more simplified than the SI output. This pattern of results implies that the cognitive load of CI, if not higher, may be as high as that of SI. The research reported here is the first to compare quantitatively the lexical features of the output of CI versus SI. The counterintuitive results lend support to the modification of the established Effort Model of CI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines uncertainty encountered by expert interpreters at Chinese Premier Press Conferences by marking interpreters' five types of hesitation phenomena and analyzes uncertainty management strategies. Results show (1) self-corrections, repetitions, and reformulations occur less frequently than pauses, indicating expert interpreter's better control of interpreting fluency; (2) speakers may impact interpreters' hesitation with segment length positively correlated with interpreters' pauses, self-correction, and reformulation, and speaking rate explains the variance in the occurrence of filled pauses; (3) pauses occur for retrieving lexical and morphological information, eliminating logical doubt, and explicating cultural connotation; (4) expert interpreters adopt addition and rank shift more than ellipsis, simplification, splitting, and repetition as uncertainty management strategies, showing an emphasis on adequacy, comprehensibility, and acceptability in their output. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]