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The series brings together volumes dealing with different aspects of learning and teaching second and foreign languages. The titles included are both monographs and edited collections focusing on a variety of topics ranging from the processes underlying second language acquisition, through various aspects of language learning in instructed and non-instructed settings, to different facets of the teaching process, including syllabus choice, materials design, classroom practices and evaluation. The publications reflect state-of-the-art developments in those areas, they adopt a wide range of theoretical perspectives and follow diverse research paradigms. The intended audience are all those who are interested in naturalistic and classroom second language acquisition, including researchers, methodologists, curriculum and materials designers, teachers and undergraduate and graduate students undertaking empirical investigations of how second languages are learnt and taught.

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This paper presents an eye-tracking study in which number processing in simultaneous interpreting was investigated. Interpreting accuracy and eye behaviour were studied together to unveil the processing and rendering of numbers by interpreting trainees (N = 22) and professional interpreters (N = 26). While professional interpreters rendered numerals and the context in which they appeared with better accuracy, there was also a positive correlation between number interpreting accuracy and context interpreting accuracy. Our results indicate that interpreting arithmetic values of numerals is more cognitively demanding than interpreting their context, which is reflected in longer mean fixation duration on numbers than on the elements they referred to. Further research is needed to investigate numerical data processing in other tasks, involving other language pairs and interpreting directionality. The study outcomes may be a useful contribution to research on the cognitive aspects of simultaneous interpreting, numerical data processing, as well as interpreter training.

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Simultaneous interpreting is a cognitively demanding task, based on performing several activities concurrently (Gile 1995; Seeber 2011). While multitasking itself is challenging, there are numerous tasks which make interpreting even more difficult, such as rendering of numbers and proper names, or dealing with a speaker's strong accent (Gile 2009). Among these, number interpreting is cognitively taxing since numerical data cannot be derived from the context and it needs to be rendered in a word-to-word manner (Mazza 2001). In our study, we aimed to examine cognitive load involved in number interpreting and to verify whether access to visual materials in the form of slides increases number interpreting accuracy in simultaneous interpreting performed by professional interpreters (N = 26) and interpreting trainees (N = 22). We used a remote EyeLink 1000+ eye-tracker to measure fixation count, mean fixation duration, and gaze time. The participants interpreted two short speeches from English into Polish, both containing 10 numerals. Slides were provided for one of the presentations. Our results show that novices are characterised by longer fixations and they provide a less accurate interpretation than professional interpreters. In addition, access to slides increases number interpreting accuracy. The results obtained might be a valuable contribution to studies on visual processing in simultaneous interpreting, number interpreting as a competence, as well as interpreter training.

The present paper reports on an experiment in which the use of possessives is investigated in an interpreting task from English to Polish. The English possessive determiner system is neutral with respect to the syntactic position of the antecedent possessor, while Polish distinguishes lexically between locally bound – i.e. reflexive – and non-reflexive possessive modifiers. The interpreter therefore has to ‘compute’ mentally the syntactic position of the antecedent possessor in order to make the correct choice in Polish as the target language. The study shows that this is cognitively a very demanding task in simultaneous interpreting, as many errors as well as self-corrections occur. The study furthermore shows that interpreters adapt their language to their audience, and adequate omissions, as well as correct form of the possessive occur more often when they have a group of engineers in mind than when they interpret for language specialists. We understand this to mean that the cognitive complexity of solving the cross-linguistic asymmetry in the possessive system causes more errors when the interpreter stays closer to the source text in speaking to language specialists.

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