ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 answers the second and third research questions by investigating cognitive overload and coping strategies regarding end negation in signed-to-spoken language simultaneous interpreting. Although many professional Auslan/English interpreters rendered individual Auslan sentences ending with negation accurately into English, few interpreters rendered all these Auslan sentences correctly when they occurred in a row. Local analysis of interpreters’ accurate English renditions of adjacent Auslan sentences featuring end negation revealed that they employed the following four strategies to cope with this particular type of syntactical difference between Auslan and English: (i) waiting for nearly the entire Auslan sentence and starting to interpret only when or after seeing the end negation in order to produce an accurate and idiomatic English rendition; (ii) using moderate or long onset processing time, starting to interpret the initial meaning unit of the Auslan sentence before seeing the end negation, absorbing further information (e.g., end negation) while rendering the initial meaning unit into English, or pausing to receive the further information, then interpreting the end negation appropriately in order to produce a complete English sentence; (iii) adhering to the pseudo-cleft (rhetorical question) structure of the Auslan sentence, starting to pose a question before seeing the end negation, then providing a negative answer; and (iv) predicting the end negation.
