Syntactic Processing in Professional Interpreters: Understanding Ambiguous Sentences in Reading and Translation

This study evaluates the way in which interpreters activate the source language and the target language (TL) when they perform the interpreting task. We focused on syntactic ambiguities. In sentences like Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony, two antecedents (‘servant’ and ‘actress’) are potential correct agents of the clause (who was on the balcony). Previous studies showed that Native English speakers interpret the second antecedent as the agent (actress); Spanish speakers prefer the first antecedent (servant), and Spanish–English bilinguals do not show any preference. In the present study, we observed the interpreters’ syntactic processing when they either read the ambiguous sentences in Spanish to repeat them in Spanish or read the sentences in Spanish to translate them into English. The way ambiguous sentences were processed depended on the task: professionals did not show a clear attachment preference when they read and repeated sentences, while they used the strategy preferred in the TL when they performed the interpreting task. Interpreters managed TL syntactic properties in a flexible manner during the comprehension phase of the interpreting task.