ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 addresses the second and third research questions by presenting findings from the quantitative analysis of the professional Auslan/English interpreters’ processing time of 40 Auslan sentences featuring numbers and negation, both being likely reasons for cognitive overload. Results revealed that interpreters’ processing time not only varied from one person to another but also fluctuated throughout the Auslan-to-English simultaneous interpreting task. Unsurprisingly, the accuracy rate of interpreting a cluster of numbers that occurred in adjacent Auslan sentences was substantially lower than the accuracy rate of rendering the individual numbers. Interestingly, for 17 of 32 Auslan numbers, the median processing time for accurate renditions of the numbers was considerably shorter than that for inaccurate renditions of the numbers. Moreover, regarding Auslan sentences whose numbers were interpreted accurately, for 19 Auslan numbers, interpreters’ onset processing time of their respective Auslan sentences was significantly longer than their number processing time. Both findings indicate that many interpreters shortened their processing time to interpret numbers accurately. Qualitative analysis of Auslan-to-English simultaneous interpretations revealed that both excessively short onset processing time and exceptionally long onset processing time sometimes caused problems such as source language intrusion and unjustifiable omissions. Furthermore, interpreters’ processing time changed as they switched from one coping strategy to another.
