Persian Verb-Last Sentences in Simultaneous Interpreting

Abstract

One of the liveliest ongoing debates concerning research on interpreting is the issue of language-specific structural asymmetries as a point to be taken into consideration in the process of simultaneous interpreting. The traditional approach to the aforementioned issue is pioneered by Seleskovitch and Lederer who reject the role of typological differences. Quite contrarily, the current view advocated by information-processing (IP) theorists looks at the typological differences of the two language pairs with more dilated eyes and assumes some difficulty emanating from the left-branching and especially verb-last structure of the input language in the SI process. This study is designed to investigate the significant relation(s) between Persian SOV word order and Persian-English simultaneous interpreting. To this end, a contrastive and exploratory analysis of the two languages was conducted. A corpus consisting of several speakers’ inputs along with their synchronized interpreters’ outputs were collected and meticulously compared so as to find out whether the Persian-English interpreters adopt any strategies in connection with the verb-last word order of Persian, and if so, what strategies and to what extent.