The impact of directionality on interpreters’ syntactic processing: Insights from syntactic dependency relation measures

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of interpreting direction on interpreters’ syntactic processing strategies, utilizing a bidirectional parallel corpus from UN Security Council meetings of Chinese-English simultaneous interpretations and their original speeches. Two syntactic measures of dependency, namely, dependency distance and dependency direction, are used to examine the syntactic complexity and typological characteristics of interpreted speech in comparison to that of non-interpreted speech in the target language, to reflect how interpreters process sentences. The study showed that when interpreters worked from L2 to L1, they employed less complex syntactic structures, indicating a tendency towards simplification, while such a pattern was not observed in the opposite direction. Additionally, interpreters were found to adjust the word order of interpreted speech in both directions to produce an idiomatic rendition. These findings suggest that when professional interpreters prepare adequately, the constraint of directionality on their cognitive capability appears to be limited. Language pair-related factors, including the influence of the source language and the normative requirement to comply with target language conventions, tended to have a greater impact on how they processed sentences in both directions.