Testing the effort models’ tightrope hypothesis in simultaneous interpreting – a contribution

Abstract

In a sample of 10 professionals interpreting the same source speech in the simultaneous mode, errors and omissions (e/o’s) were found to affect different source-speech segments, and a large proportion among them were only made by a small proportion of the subjects. In a repeat performance, there were some new e/o’s in the second version when the same interpreters had interpreted the relevant segments correctly in the first version. These findings are in line with the Effort Models’ ‘Tightrope Hypothesis’ that many e/o’s are due not to the intrinsic difficulty of the corresponding source-speech segments, but to the interpreters working close to processing capacity saturation, which makes them vulnerable to even small variations in the available processing capacity for each interpreting component.

Keywords

• interpretação simultânea
• erros
• omissões
• carga cognitiva
• hipótese da corda bamba
• saturação cognitiva