Numbers during simultaneous interpreting: an account, from a cognitive science perspective, of the sources of difficulty when interpreting numbers, and an appraisal of advice given to interpreters to address this difficulty

Diplôme Master Numbers during simultaneous interpreting: an account, from a cognitive science perspective, of the sources of difficulty when interpreting numbers, and an appraisal of advice given to interpreters to address this difficulty eng 2018 author Shanmugalingam Pradheep 839197 director Seeber Kilian 0000-0002-7903-6246 513613 Numbers may seem “easy” to interpret, for having fixed correspondences between source and target language. However they are also less predictable, less informationally redundant, and less amenable to terse expression, than other types of information and so are more taxing on working memory, a key cognitive constraint during simultaneous interpreting. The appearance of unpredictable numerical information in a speech causes an increase in cognitive load for the interpreter, which can cause rendering problems. Misalignments between source and target language number systems can add another layer of difficulty. I argue that advice such as note-taking, segmentation, and reformulating the order of information can help mitigate these difficulties to some extent. But numerical information will always be one of the more difficult types of information to interpret, for student and expert interpreters alike. Expert interpreters may be “better at numbers” because of general language proficiency advantages, and because they have acquired long term memory schemas for handling formulaic, non-numerical, parts of speeches, which should also inform advice given to students. numbers simultaneous interpreting chunking working memory long term memory cognitive load numerical cognition information processing redundancy formulaic language interpreter training expertise Dewey 418.02 Maîtrise universitaire en Interprétation de Conférence 113 Département d'interprétation 93 false 21723c29-bdd0-4228-ae5d-34eb5dbe224d Master thesis Public Pradheep_Memoire_archive.pdf 872257 application/pdf openAccess Faculté de traduction et d'interprétation / Département d'interprétation

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Numbers during simultaneous interpreting: an account, from a cognitive science perspective, of the sources of difficulty when interpreting numbers, and an appraisal of advice given to interpreters to address this difficulty				2018	921	938

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Shanmugalingam, Pradheep