The Investigation of Interpreters’ Stress during Simultaneous Interpretation from English into Arabic and Vice Versa

This paper deals with simultaneous interpreting as a demanding cognitive task that involves various cognitive processes under severe time pressure; it is considered one of the most stressful tasks which causes heavy cognitive load on interpreters. Stress in interpreting refers to those responses that have emotional and harmful effects which occur when the requirements of the task are more than interpreters available resources. Interpreters experience different types of stress during Simultaneous Interpretation (SI) such as environmental, i.e. temperature, humidity and air quality as well as Psychological stress affected by personal factors such as self-confidence and the situation judgment way. The study aims at investigating stress experienced by professional and student interpreters during English-Arabic-English SI. It is hypothesized that the more professional the interpreter is, the more able s/he is to successfully cope with this stress by utilizing some stress coping strategies. In order to investigate the impact of stress on the interpreters performance when rendering simultaneously and to study interpreters awareness of stress, 40 student and 3 professional interpreters are chosen to participate in English-Arabic-English interpreting tasks. The study concludes that both groups experienced stress in this dual task. However, students stress has negative effects on their performance and on the interpreting process when they resorted to pause and omit the SL segments. On the other hand, professionals stress motivated them to search and apply stress coping strategies such as inferring the meaning of the source message and generalization