The extent to which language specificity imposes additional difficulties on interpreting has been an issue of ongoing debate (Setton 1999; Donato 2003). Language specificity refers to language-specific factors, such as differences in language structures and cultural conceptualization between source language (SL) and target language (TL) (Gile 2002). Conflicting views have emerged with regard to the impact of language specificity on interpreting. Supporters of the Universality Hypothesis, represented by the Paris School, deny the relevance of language-specific factors in interpreting and believe that interpreting is not fundamentally different from monolingual speaking because all language-specific difficulties can be avoided through deverbalization – a widely taught strategy that prioritizes sense over language forms (Seleskovitch 1978; Lederer 1998). In contrast, Information Processing theorists consider language specificity to be a major obstacle in interpreting that requires specific strategies (Donato 2003; Gile 2005). One prominent indicator of language specificity is the difference between the SL and TL in syntax or word order (Gile 2005; Li 2015). Interpreters dealing with syntactically different language pairs may experience greater cognitive constraints as a result of syntactic disambiguation, heavy memory load and coordination (Gile 2002; Christoffels, De Groot, and Kroll 2006). To examine the effect of language specificity on interpreting performance, studies of different language combinations have been conducted and have provided empirical evidence for a negative impact of word order asymmetry on interpreting performance (Gile 2011b; Seeber and Kerzel 2012).

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