Conference Interpreters' Perceptions of the Importance of Extra-linguistic Context in Arabic-English and English-Arabic Simultaneous Interpreting

Abstract

Extra-linguistic context has been widely regarded as an essential part of successful simultaneous interpreting, which allows interpreters not only to decode linguistic content of a message but also to understand the speaker's intended meaning in a wider communicative context. Although previous studies have studied the effect of the contextual knowledge on interpreting competence, little research has been done to explore how the context interacts with the directionality of simultaneous interpreting from and into Arabic and English languages. The current study is aimed at studying interpreters' perceptions of the role of the extra-linguistic context in interpreting from and into Arabic and English and at finding out whether the contribution of the contextual knowledge is different with respect to the target language. The current study has used the method of quantitative survey research to study interpreters' perceptions of the role of the extra-linguistic context in interpreting from and into Arabic and English. The data were collected from 107 professional bidirectional Arabic-English conference interpreters. This quantitative study employed a structured questionnaire analyzed with descriptive statistics and paired-samples t-tests in SPSS. The results show that interpreters consider extra-linguistic context to be essential for the success of simultaneous interpretation irrespective of the direction of interpretation. It was found out that extra-linguistic context enables the interpreter to predict the upcoming information, comprehend the intentions of the speaker better, helps to understand culturally loaded expressions, makes it easier to recall terminology, and saves cognitive resources. A statistical analysis also shows a significant difference in the perceived importance of extra-linguistic context in Arabic-English vs. English-Arabic interpretations.