Language interference in Mandarin Chinese-English simultaneous interpreting: insights from multi-dimensional syntactic complexity

Abstract

Simultaneous interpreting (SI), a cognitively demanding task that requires real-time language comprehension and production, is influenced by source speech complexity. While extensive research has utilized mean dependency distance (MDD) to examine interpreted language, the interaction between MDD and genre in SI remains underexplored. Through the lens of cross-linguistic interference, this study investigates the influence of MDD in Mandarin Chinese source speech on the syntactic complexity of English output in SI, with a focus on the moderating effect of genre. We used the Presser Corpus, a parallel corpus of professionally interpreted press conferences that encompasses six sub-corpora across three genres: economics, healthcare, and politics/governance. The results reveal that the MDD of the source speech strongly affects the syntactic complexity of the SI output, especially at the clausal level. Pairwise comparisons indicated that the relationship between source speech MDD and syntactic complexity in interpreted outputs exhibits genre-dependent variability, as significant positive correlations were discovered in healthcare and politics/governance genres. These findings provide insights into the interplay of dependency distance and genre in shaping task difficulty and cognitive effort in Mandarin Chinese–English SI. The results have theoretical and practical implications for interpreter training and professional practice.