A relevance-theoretic approach to interpreting ELF input

Although the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) has become a new professional reality for translators and interpreters, its implications for translating and interpreting have only recently started to be investigated scientifically (Albl-Mikasa, 2018). This PhD project focuses on the impact of (the often hybrid nature of) ELF on simultaneous interpreters' processing of source text from a pragmatics perspective. Findings from Reithofer's (2013) comprehension-testing study, namely that an ELF speech was understood less well by the audience than its simultaneous interpretation into the audience's first language, suggest that interpreters manage to produce coherent target texts from less coherent source text input, presumably levelling out ELF-induced problems. To date, no research has been done on how exactly this is achieved. Drawing on the pragmatic framework of Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1995), transcriptions of professional interpreters' renditions of an ELF source text are subjected to a qualitative product analysis and compared with renditions of an edited English version of the same source text to assess the cognitive effects generated by the interpreters. More specifically, the explicatures identified in the interpretations are compared with those in the source texts with regard to the enrichment processes interpreters may have engaged in. According to Relevance Theory, these include "disambiguation, reference assignment, the resolution of vagueness, and the recovery of ellipsed or unexpressed material" (Blakemore, 1987, p. 72). As the relation between cognitive effects and processing effort has been shown to be crucial for the description of the translation process as a cognitive activity (Alves, 2007; Alves & Gonçalves, 2015, 2003), the product analysis is triangulated with process data to gauge the cognitive effort involved in the interpreting processes. This contribution will present an overview of the study design as well as preliminary results of a pilot study conducted as part of the PhD project on two interpretations of the ELF source text and two interpretations of the edited English source text, and report on possible differences in the interpretations of ELF as opposed to edited English input