ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 answers the first research question by presenting findings from the external raters’ assessment of the 20 professional interpreters’ Auslan-to-English simultaneous interpreting performance, and by reporting findings from the thematic analysis of the interpreters’ qualitative interview data. Results revealed that the 10 native signers were similar to the 10 non-native signers not only in terms of the overall Auslan-to-English simultaneous interpreting performance (total score), but also in terms of each of the four sub-scores for accuracy, target text features, delivery features, and processing skills. These findings indicate that age of signed language acquisition did not significantly influence the interpreters’ signed-to-spoken language simultaneous interpreting performance. Interpreters reported four types of challenges in simultaneous interpreting from a signed language into a spoken language: (i) signed language comprehension problems such as sign variation; (ii) cognitive overload due to numbers, long processing time, syntactical differences between the source language and the target language, and information density; (iii) target speech production difficulties such as the need to ensure comprehensibility, coherence, and formal register of the target speech; and (iv) artificial testing conditions of this experimental study. Moreover, interpreters stated that they employed coping strategies such as adjusting processing time, making strategic omissions, summarising, and generalising.
