Speech characteristics as progress indicators in simultaneous interpreting by trainee interpreters

This paper examines speech characteristics of trainee interpreters simultaneously interpreting from English into Croatian during three months of training. It investigates different types of content departures in the form of substitutions, omissions and additions, and their influence on the overall performance in simultaneous interpreting, both on the intertextual and intratextual level. It identifies overall patterns of these departures on the level of the sentence and of individual lexical items, and shows the most typical departures by providing a detailed typology for each of them. Phrasing changes most likely signal progress and shift in the trainee’s skill from verbosity and literal word-for-word interpreting to condensation and abstraction