Reporting stress in simultaneous interpreting. The analysis of trainee interpreters’ retrospective reports and outputs

Resumen

The aim of this study is to determine the sources of stress for trainee interpreters and the coping strategies and/or stress-prevention strategies they adopt. It relies on retrospective protocols of trainees, in which they report stress experienced during simultaneous interpreting task. The study also triangulates process analysis (data in the form of retrospective protocols) with product analysis (manual comparison of source and target texts) to findout whether the stress reported during retrospection affects the product. The segments in which participants reported stress are analysed in search of 3 types of disfluencies: anomalous pauses exceeding 2 seconds, hesitation markers and false starts. The analysis also aims at investigating the relation between stress and directionality. The results show that the majority of target-text segments in which trainees reported having experienced stress are marked by disfluencies. The most frequently mentioned stressors are the delivery rate of the speaker, lexical search under time pressure, and interpreting failure in the preceding part of the text. Trainees have been found to cope with stress in most cases adopting the

economy of expression strategies. These types of strategies were also adopted as stress

prevention mechanisms. Another finding of the study reveals that stress is reported considerably

more frequently in the retour than in the native.