What Affects the Word Order of Target Language in Simultaneous Interpretation

A simultaneous interpretation has to be conducted to shorten delay and reduce working memory load. The interpreters adopt a strategy that generates a target language in a word order which is similar to the source language. To make it clear how the interpreters decide the word order in practice, we conduct a statistical study based on the comparison of the word order between translation and simultaneous interpretation. The analysis reveals that in 10.5% of all cases, interpreters maintain the word order of source language, instead of adopting inversion as the translation, and that syntactic factors, including dependencies of chunk pairs, length of post-modifier, affect the word order decision more than non-syntactic factors.