ABSTRACT
The global spread of English as lingua franca (ELF) has impacted interpreting in far-reaching ways. Interpreters often cover up ELF-induced difficulties by drawing on their skills and motivation to produce an improved version of the source speech. More combinational complexity is manifested on the lexical and phrase level. ELF has been found in corpus studies to be variable, diverse, creatively appropriated and cross-linguistically influenced by a variety of lingua-cultural backgrounds. Interpreters’ introspective reports stress that violations at the pragmatic, syntactic, morphological and lexico-semantic levels increase the cognitive load for all listeners, making capacity management a central topic both within and beyond interpreting studies. The interpreting profession would benefit greatly from research that can identify settings in which ELF works and those in which it fails to work and the extent to which language experts can enhance events with a majority of non-native speakers.
