Strategies of simultaneous interpreting and directionality

Abstract

This article describes an experimental study on strategies of simultaneous interpreting used by 36 advanced students working in two directions: from English (B) into Polish (A) and the reverse. The material analysed comprises retrospective remarks provided by the subjects, prompted by listening to the source texts and their interpretations directly after the interpreting task. Twenty-one interpreting strategies were identified; a detailed classification and examples of relevant protocol fragments are presented. The results suggest that strategic processing differs considerably when interpreting into Polish (A) and into English (B), which can be attributed mainly to directionality but, in some cases, also to language-pair specificity. Some of the differences run counter to the initial hypotheses, and possible explanations for this are discussed.