DIRECTIONALITY AND CONTEXT EFFECTS IN WORD TRANSLATION TASKS PERFORMED BY CONFERENCE INTERPRETERS

Professional interpreters hired by multinational organisations often work into their L1 from their L2, whereas freelance interpreters work both into and out of their L1. A research was designed to examine if long-term interpreting unidirectional practise (in the L2-L1 direction only) improves the speed of lexical retrieval exhibited by reduced translation latencies, as opposed to bidirectional practise (in the L2-L1 and L1-L2 directions). Oral translations of nouns presented in isolation, high context constraint sentences, and low context constraint sentences were provided by 48 professional conference interpreters. The findings show that the dominating directionality in interpreting practise has minimal influence on the strength of interlingual lexical linkages in the interpreter's mental lexicon, or that other factors (such as language usage, exposure, and immersion) may counterbalance any such influence. The study also discovered an expected context effect, indicating that interpreters employ semantic constraint to predict sentence-ending terms