TB+-+Source+3+-+GILE

Main points, important quotes and key terms:

== Effort Models: a set of models developed to “account for errors and omissions observed in the performance of simultaneous and consecutive interpreters which could not be easily attributed to deficient linguistic abilities, insufficient extralinguistic knowledge or poor conditions in the delivery of the source text”. They are based on cognitive concepts, “in particular the concept of limited attentional resources and the assumption of a strong correlation between task difficulty and task implementation duration”. ==

P - the Production Effort (production operations);
== M - the short-term Memory Effort (short-term memory operations)– “essentially dealing with memory operations from the time a speech segment is heard to the time it is reformulated in the target speech or disappears from memory”. ==

== “Speech comprehension and speech production under ordinary conditions include non-automatic components. In simultaneous interpreting, there is no reason to assume that speech comprehension is more automatic than in ordinary conditions”. It could be automatic if the “interpretation” was made only word-for-word. However, any real interpretation requires grammar changes, paraphrases, and, as the name of it shows, interpretation of speeches. ==

== “The three Efforts are at least partly competitive, meaning that even if they share [cognitive] resources and may be somewhat cooperative, the net result of their coexistence will usually be an increase in processing capacity requirements (the ‘competition hypothesis’). == == In mathematical terms, this ‘competition hypothesis’ can be represented in the following way, with the total processing capacity consumption TotC associated with interpreting at any time represented as a ‘sum’ (not in the pure arithmetic sense) of consumption for L, consumption for M and consumption for P, with further consumption for ‘coordination’ (C) between the Efforts, that is, the management of capacity allocation between the Efforts: ==

== “Problem triggers” are parts of speech that require more attentional resources. They received this name because “if indeed interpreters work near saturation level, even limited additional attentional requirements could lead to failure”. ==

== “Speech segments with low redundancy were also problem triggers, since they had low tolerance of attentional lapses such as might occur because of attentional mismanagement”. Proper names with “low morphological redundancy” (such as Cliff) and with “heightened attentional requirements” (such as Pacific Islands Development Commission) are also problem triggers. ==

== “These triggers could generate failures at a distance, when attentional resources were diverted from one Effort to another where ‘reinforcement’ was necessary, thus ‘saving’ one speech segment but jeopardizing an ulterior segment in a ‘failure sequence’” ==

== The tightrope hypothesis is “the idea that most of the time, total capacity consumption is close to the interpreter’s total available capacity, so that any increase in processing capacity requirements and any instance of mismanagement of cognitive resources by the interpreter can bring about overload or local attentional deficit (in one of the Efforts) and consequent deterioration of the interpreter’s output. This ‘tightrope hypothesis’ is crucial in explaining the high frequency of errors and omissions that can be observed in interpreting even when no particular technical or other difficulties can be identified in the source speech”. ==