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Article published In: Translation and Interpreting Studies
Vol. 19:2 (2024) ► pp.234–256

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Probing the cognitive load of consecutive interpreters

A corpus-based study

ORCiD logo with link | Graduate Institute of Interpretation and Translation (GIIT), Shanghai International Studies University (SISU)
ORCiD logo with link | Graduate Institute of Interpretation and Translation (GIIT), Shanghai International Studies University (SISU)
Published online: 9 November 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.22047.mor
Abstract
This study employs four purpose-built corpora to assess the frequency of the disfluency marker uh (emm) in Chinese-English consecutive interpreting (CI) renditions as a proxy measure of interpreters’ cognitive load. Based on Plevoets and Defrancq (Plevoets, Koen, and Bart Defrancq. 2016. “The effect of informational load on disfluencies in interpreting: A corpus-based regression analysis.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 11(2): 202–224. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2018. “The cognitive load of interpreters in the European Parliament: A corpus-based study of predictors for the disfluency uh (m).” Interpreting 20(1): 1–28. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), the frequencies are compared across four informational load indicators: delivery rate, lexical density, proportion of numbers, and sentence length. The analysis also probes the potential influence of interpreting directionality on disfluencies. Results reveal differential effects of the four informational load indicators on disfluencies and, by extension, interpreters’ cognitive load, while Chinese-to-English CI is associated with an increase in disfluencies compared to English-to-Chinese for interpreters with Chinese as their A language.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Four informational load indicators in consecutive interpreting
  • Data and methods
    • Participants
    • Measures
    • Corpus data
    • Analysis
  • Results
    • Relations between informational load indicators and disfluencies
    • Informational indicators in SC and the frequency of disfluency markers in TE
    • Informational indicators in SE and the frequency of disfluency markers in TC
    • Informational indicators in TE and the frequency of disfluency markers in TE
    • Interpreting directionality and cognitive load
  • Discussion
  • Conclusion, limitations, and suggestions for future studies
  • Notes
  • References
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2025. Assessing effects of source text complexity on L2 learners’ interpreting performance: a dependency-based approach. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 63:4 ► pp. 2717 ff. DOI logo
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