ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 brings everything together by synthesising the key findings for the three research questions. Firstly, challenges in simultaneous interpreting from a signed language (Auslan) into a spoken language (English) at a formal setting included: (i) signed language comprehension problems, (ii) cognitive overload, (iii) target speech production difficulties, and (iv) artificial testing conditions of this experimental study. Secondly, professional Auslan/English interpreters not only reported but also experienced cognitive overload in Auslan-to-English simultaneous interpreting, which was due to numbers, dense information, long processing time, and syntactical differences between the source language and the target language, among others. Strikingly, few interpreters rendered adjacent Auslan sentences featuring numbers or negation near or at the end of the sentence accurately into English. Thirdly, interpreters employed a range of coping strategies to deal with the aforementioned challenges and cognitive overload, including adjusting processing time, stalling, summarising, making strategic omissions, making strategic additions, generalising, prediction, using a predominantly literal interpretation approach, and switching between free interpretation and literal interpretation, as illustrated by the representative examples in Chapters 5, 6, and 7. Based on these findings, this chapter proposes essential knowledge and skills that are necessary for interpreters to work successfully from a signed language into a spoken language.
