A corpus-based investigation of VSO-SVO usage in English>Arabic simultaneous interpreting

Abstract

One of the major challenges in English>Arabic simultaneous interpreting (SI) is the handling of structural asymmetry between subject-verb-object (SVO) English and the verb-subject-object (VSO) structure in Modern Standard Arabic (henceforth Arabic). In Arabic, a VSO word order is dominant although a nominal clause with several variations is also available, including a marked SVO structure with a preverbal subject followed by a verbal predicate (VPr.) functioning as its khabar (rheme/comment). This paper reports on an empirical study of the handling of structural asymmetry between English SVO and Arabic VSO structures in English>Arabic SI. The study uses a parallel corpus consisting of the transcription of 10 multiple Arabic SI versions of three political English speeches. We hypothesize that the Arabic simultaneous interpreters are more likely to use the English-mimicking SVO structure since it is easier to process and requires less cognitive load on their memory. The results of our corpus-based analysis indicate that the marked SVO structure was used more frequently than the unmarked VSO structure. These results lead to the conclusion that the use of the SVO clause is a feature of English>Arabic SI. We also conclude that the Arabic simultaneous interpreters were effectively engaged in «form-based processing» by opting for the structure that has the closest match to English SVO structures as a tactic to cope with syntactic asymmetry. Our conclusions lend support to the «language-pair specificity» hypothesis since the lack of need for restructuring is only available in SI between language pairs with similar or flexible structures.  Keywords: Language-pair specificity, Syntactic asymmetry, VSO-SVO ratio, Simultaneous interpreting, Corpus analysis