JĘZYK W POZNANIU Ogólnopolska Studencka Językoznawcza Konferencja Naukowa
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Katarzyna Stachowiak (Poznań)

"Mental tongue slips" - production errors without uttering a word: A study on interpreters and translators

Slips of the tongue would for long be considered as errors in speech production, deviations from intended linguistic message of the speaker (Sturtevant 1947). Yet, it has not been made completely clear what stage of language processing the errors refer to, as speaking itself is a highly complex task. As Levelt pointed out, a speaker needs to undergo semantic, syntactic, phonological, and articulatory processing stages within milliseconds while uttering a word (Levelt 1987), which reflects the possibility of slips of the tongue being generated before the articulation. Mōller et al. (2007) have observed specific brain activity prior to the vocalization of spoonerisms, indicating the presence of mechanisms generating (and in some cases detecting and correcting) speech errors before they are said out loud.
The present study is an experiment based on the translation process, aimed at analysing errors in time-constrained target text production. Two groups of participants: interpreters and translators performed a series of tasks involving translation activity under pressure, which generated a number of production errors, commonly classified as anticipation, perseverance and substitution. Interestingly, there was a wide range of errors observed, occuring at the level of phonemes, morphemes, syllables and words. The results give insight into the process of language and language errors' production, while at the same time revealing the differences between interpreters and translators.



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