Meaning-making in interpreting ELF input – the amplified role of context

With the spread of English as a lingua franca (ELF), conference interpreters are increasingly confronted with non-native English source speeches. Apart from dealing with a variety of L1-induced accents, interpreters may also have to cope with a wide range of ELF-related phenomena such as lack of cohesion and unclear argumentation, lexical and grammatical irregularities and increased signs of processing, all of which may hamper the interpreter's comprehension. In order to level out such ELF-induced difficulties and more fully understand the intended speaker meaning, interpreters often need to rely to a greater degree on their world knowledge to draw context-related inferences. Data collected within the ongoing SNSF Sinergia project Cognitive Load in Interpreting and Translation (CLINT) allows us to analyse 24 professional conference interpreters' German renditions of two authentic ELF speeches, as compared to edited versions of the same speeches that comply with native usage. One of the ELF speeches and its edited counterpart treat a rather general topic, whereas the other pair of speeches are on a highly technical topic. To investigate whether the impact of ELF on source speech comprehension is mitigated by accessibility of contextual knowledge, we compared 1) the number of context- based additions in the target speeches, 2) interpreters' self-perceived comprehensibility of the source speech as indicated in the retrospective questionnaire, and 3) sense consistency and completeness of renditions as analysed in an accuracy rating. The comparison revealed an effect of technicality: the differences in comprehensibility and interpreting accuracy between the ELF and edited versions were smaller for the general speech, where interpreters made more context-based additions, than for the domain-specific speech where participants could not be expected to have much previous knowledge. These findings suggest that world knowledge may help to close gaps in meaning and resolve unclarity in ELF speeches in cases where contextual knowledge is accessible