Probing the cognitive load of consecutive interpreters

Abstract

Abstract This study employs four purpose-built corpora to assess the frequency of the disfluency marker uh (emm) in Chinese-English consecutive interpreting (CI) renditions as a proxy measure of interpreters’ cognitive load. Based on Plevoets and Defrancq (2016, 2018), the frequencies are compared across four informational load indicators: delivery rate, lexical density, proportion of numbers, and sentence length. The analysis also probes the potential influence of interpreting directionality on disfluencies. Results reveal differential effects of the four informational load indicators on disfluencies and, by extension, interpreters’ cognitive load, while Chinese-to-English CI is associated with an increase in disfluencies compared to English-to-Chinese for interpreters with Chinese as their A language.