Given the research by Brasel (1969/1976), Gabrian & Williams (2009), and the current study what conclusions can be make regarding assignment duration and interpreter fatigue?
The first observation is that there is evidence of fatigue setting in after twenty-five minutes across ALL THREE of these studies and that the evidence of fatigue becomes greater as the total assignment duration increases. This supports the idea that interpreters should switch interpreter roles between twenty and twenty-five minutes of sustained lecture content.
This study did NOT investigate interpreting situations where interpreters DID switch, however, and so it cannot speak to the effectiveness of sustained TEAM interpreting as a hedge against fatigue. In other words, both members of an interpreting team may very well BOTH become fatigued within a sustained interpreting environment if both team members are actively processing the informational content for more than 25 minutes, even though only one of the interpreters is actively interpreting that content.
The second observation, so far, is that overall the message quality does not appear to be significantly impacted within forty-five minutes of sustained interpretation. During the data collection process each data sample was briefly viewed at random segments to verify that each recording was successful. At no time were any of the interpretations determined to be inaccurate or less than useful to their prospective consumers. This observation is not supported by a thorough analysis across all the subjects, however, so it remains in doubt.
Other observations that occurred within the data collection process but not yet directly analyzed include the following:
- Interpreting for an inattentive Deaf consumer can be fatiguing. Interpreting for an extremely attentive Deaf consumer can serve as a counter-balance to fatigue.
- Interpreting a disorganized message or a message generated in less-than-natively-fluent English (common examples come from student presentations) can be fatiguing.
- Monologic (lecture) content is often less fatiguing than dialogic (conversational) content.
- Content that is familiar, of interest to the interpreter or otherwise predictable is generally less fatiguing than uninteresting/unknown content or presentation styles where it is difficult to make predictions about the upcoming content.
- Interpreting group discussions is generally perceived by interpreters as the most difficult work for interpreters to be effective.
In other words - Source and Target consumers can significantly impact the interpreter's own sense of fatigue. Organized source texts and attentive target-language consumers have positive effects. Disorganized/disfluent source texts and in-attentive target-language consumers have negative effects.
