Inaccuracies and strategies related to cognitive overload in simultaneous interpreting

Abstract This case study uses microanalysis to explore how cognitive overload regarding numbers causes errors in a professional interpreter’s authentic simultaneous interpretations. The interpreter rendered impromptu speeches — interviewees’ long answers to interviewers’ questions — between English (B) and Mandarin (A) in the simultaneous mode in conference settings. The microanalysis involves local analysis of adjacent simultaneous interpretations of source speech segments featuring numbers. The results revealed that factors such as increased total processing capacity requirements associated with numbers, features of spontaneous speeches, interpreters’ inappropriate allocation of available processing capacity, syntactic restructuring, and excessively long processing time jointly caused cognitive overload in simultaneous interpreting (SI), which in turn led to inaccurate renditions of numbers and their neighbouring elements. Additionally, the interpreter employed strategies to cope with number-related cognitive overload such as making conscious strategic omissions and using short processing time for numbers. Microanalysis has proven useful for investigating cognitive load in SI.