This study examined omissions, errors, and variability in lexical selection across simultaneous interpretations of President Obama’s 2009 inaugural address, in three spoken languages (French, German, Japanese) and in American Sign Language (ASL). Microanalysis of how information conveyed by 39 source speech lexical items was transferred into the target languages assessed to what extent omissions and errors reflected differences in lexical structure (relative frequency of ready lexical correspondents and of shared cognates between the source and target languages; and, for ASL in particular, size of lexicon compared to English). The highest number of errors and omissions was found in ASL, which has the smallest documented vocabulary, fewest lexical correspondents, and no shared cognates with English. If omission/error rates in interpretation of lexical units are taken as a rough indicator of interpreting difficulty, results suggest that it is more difficult to interpret the speech into Japanese than into French or German and, by the same token, more difficult to interpret it into ASL than into the three spoken languages. These findings are consistent with the idea that language structures impact cognitive load during interpreting, and that interpreting effort increases in relation to the degree of difference between the source and target languages.

中文翻译：

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口头和手语口译中的词汇决定和相关的认知问题：以奥巴马就职演说为例

这项研究以三种口语（法语，德语，日语）和美国手语（ASL）对奥巴马总统2009年就职演说的同声解释进行了词法选择的遗漏，错误和变异性。微观分析如何将39种源语言词汇项所传达的信息转移到目标语言中，以评估遗漏和错误在多大程度上反映了词法结构上的差异（现成词汇通讯员的相对频率以及源语言和目标语言之间的共同认知的相对频率；以及特别是ASL，与英语相比，词典的大小）。在ASL中发现的错误和遗漏次数最多，ASL记录的词汇量最少，词汇通讯员最少，并且没有与英语的共同认知。如果将词法单位解释中的遗漏/错误率作为解释难度的粗略指标，则结果表明，将语音翻译成日语比翻译成法语或德语要困难得多，并且同样地，解释起来也更加困难而不是三种口头语言。这些发现与以下观点一致：语言结构会影响口译过程中的认知负荷，并且口译工作量会随着源语言和目标语言之间的差异程度而增加。