The Impact of the Source-Text Syntactic Characteristics on the Sight-Translation Strategies and Quality

Abstract

Introduction. The aim of this first research in the Slovak-English language pair, is to establish the impact of the source-text (ST) syntactic structure on the target-text (TT) quality and its delivery in sight translation (SiT), as well as to identify the problems the interpreter students have in it, and the strategies they apply to solve them. Procedure. The participants, six Slovak graduate university students, sight-translated a non-specialized 250-word text from Slovak into English. The ST structure was deliberately changed in the way that, while remaining within the source-language norms, it considerably differed from the structure of the normative version of its English translation. If the structure of a specific student's TT was close to that of the ST, it was considered an evidence of the surface-oriented strategy (SurfOS), while the ST structure transformation was viewed as an indication of a sense-oriented strategy (SensOS). Results. The syntactic similarity in the two languages facilitates anticipation and replication of the ST syntactic structures in the TT. However, SurfOS does not dominate in the composition of the participants’ translation competence. When the unsuitability of the ST structure for its transfer to the TT is obvious, most of the participants use the SensOS, which requires the transformation of the ST structure. The complicated ST syntactic structure has a negative impact upon the students’ anticipation mechanism and their processing capacity. It results in a higher short-term memory load, because of the need to retain the ST information before reformulating it in the TT. The transformation effort imposes additional limits on the overall utterance control effort. It results in unmotivated pauses, backtracking, omissions, distortion of the ST information in the TT, and the inability to simultaneously control the transformation of the structure, preservation of the ST meaning and compliance with the target-language norms. Conclusion. The ST syntactic complexity is a factor influencing the SiT efficiency. The research results also confirm the authors’ hypothesis that the lack of the required processing capacity for coping with syntactic discrepancies between the ST and TT is one of the principle difficulties the interpreters face in SiT.