“70.6 Billion World Citizens”: Investigating the difficulty of interpreting numbers

Abstract

Among all the difficulties inherent in interpreting, numbers stand out as a common and complex problem trigger. This experimental study contributes to research on the causes of errors in the passive simultaneous interpretation (SI) of numbers. Two groups of Italian Master's degree students (one for English and one for German) were asked to interpret simultaneously a number-dense speech from their respective B language into their mother tongue, Italian. Note-taking was allowed during the test and both the study participants and their lecturers completed a questionnaire afterwards. Data analysis was conducted with statistical and qualitative methods, combining the cognitivist and contextualist approach. The objective was to ascertain whether one main variable may be held responsible for the high error rate related to interpreting numbers and the difficulty perceived by students in the task. The analysis quantifies the relative impact of different causes of difficulties on participants' delivery of numbers. It stresses the crucial role of the subjective variable represented by interpreters' skills. Didactic implications and directions for future research are discussed in the conclusion.

COVID-19 Çalışma Koşullarının Sözlü Çevirmenlerin Performansları Üzerindeki Etkisini Analiz Etmek: 2020 Amerikan Başkanlık Münazaralarında Sayıların Çevirisi

“…It appears that in the case of interpreting the 2020 debates the interpreters prioritized interpreting the content over the numbers they encountered. Secondly, the different renditions on NO1 and NO2 seem to support the findings of Frittella (2019) in that the subjective variables play a key role in the interpretation of numbers.…”

“…(2021), reporting on the results of the European Parliament corpus, concluded that inaccuracies in the rendition of numbers might be accounted for by the high cognitive load of processing numbers, whereas omissions may be explained by the interpreters' need to reduce the cognitive load and may even be a conscious strategy, as previously suggested by Plevoets & Defrancq (2018). Conversely, Frittella (2019) concluded that rendition errors related to numbers may be accounted for by idiosyncratic factors, underscoring the subjectivity of interpreting numbers.…”

“…However, no conclusive result has been reached so far regarding the percentage of errors in rendering numbers. Several studies have relied on experiments rather than real interpreting instances (Braun and Clarici 1996;Desmet, Vandierendonck, and Defrancq, 2018;Frittella, 2019;Korpal and Stachowiak-Szymczak, 2020;Mazza, 2001). In one of the first studies on the subject, Braun and Clarici (1996) conducted an experiment on twelve students and found that omissions accounted for half of the incorrect renditions of numbers.…”

Defining maximum acceptable latency of AI-enhanced CAI tools

“…Over the years, a handful of empirical studies have been carried out to test the feasibility of the human-machine interaction in the simultaneous modality. They have focused in particular on the effectiveness of ASR-support during the interpretation of numbers [9,8,14], one of the problem triggers of simultaneous interpreting identified in literature [4,15,17,26]. In order to measure the impact on the quality of the rendition, these studies have used either mock-up systems with a very short latency [9,6] or real-life tools with a reported latency of under 2 seconds [8,14].…”