The impact of listening comprehension skills on simultaneous interpretation

Abstract

The article contends that, in simultaneous interpreting, the most dependable lever for maintaining both output quality and process stability is robust listening comprehension, not sheer articulatory fluency. In live interpreting, comprehension does not function as a preliminary phase that concludes once production starts; it operates continuously under strict capacity constraints while running in parallel with reformulation, self-monitoring, and delivery. When comprehension is streamlined, the interpreter can chunk the incoming stream into coherent units, disambiguate meanings early, project likely continuations, and sustain a manageable ear–voice lag without saturating short-term memory. When comprehension weakens even momentarily, the system tends to tip into overload: lag expands, memory management consumes resources needed for analysis, omissions multiply, and degradation may propagate to subsequent segments. Drawing on the Efforts Model, cognitive-load perspectives, working-memory explanations, and empirical documentation of speech rates encountered in institutional environments, the paper synthesizes four interdependent issues that training often treats in isolation: input-rate time pressure, temporal coordination as indexed by ear–voice span, the tension between comprehension and memory demands, and stress-driven strategic compression.