Publications

Publication details [#62804]

Macizo, Pedro, Giulia Togato, Natalia Paredes and Teresa Bajo. 2017. Syntactic Processing in Professional Interpreters: Understanding Ambiguous Sentences in Reading and Translation. Applied Linguistics 38 (4) : 581–598.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
Oxford University Press

Annotation

This inquiry assesses the way in which interpreters activate the source language and the target language (TL) when they perform the interpreting task, centering on syntactic ambiguities. In sentences like Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony, two antecedents (‘servant’ and ‘actress’) are potential correct agents of the clause (who was on the balcony). Former studies displayed that Native English speakers interpret the second antecedent as the agent (actress); Spanish speakers prefer the first antecedent (servant), and Spanish–English bilinguals do not display any preference. This inquiry observed the interpreters’ syntactic processing when they either read the ambiguous sentences in Spanish to repeat them in Spanish or read the sentences in Spanish to translate them into English. The way ambiguous sentences were processed depended on the task: professionals did not display a clear attachment preference when they read and repeated sentences, while they employed the strategy preferred in the TL when they performed the interpreting task. Interpreters managed TL syntactic properties in a flexible manner during the comprehension phase of the interpreting task.