Abstract：As participants of a communicative activity, simultaneous interpreters and listeners both regard “sense consistency with the original message” as the top criterion. In simultaneous interpreting (SI), sense consistency should reside in the same effect produced at cognitive and interpersonal levels on the interpreter’s audience as the original speech does on the speaker’s audience. Owing to underspecification of strategic omissions in SI assessment, this study attempts to validate its importance by analyzing a specific communicative situation, its aims and risks, and empirically comparing the cognitive effects of interpretation on a target audience and that of the source speech on a speaker’s audience. The results show that 1) the interpretation has the same, if not significantly better effect on the target audience; 2) interpreters, in principle, skip repetitive and un-stressed content according to para-verbal information; 3) contextualized information, modifying phrases, discourse markers, semantically redundant and transitional expressions are common types of strategic omission.
Key words: simultaneous interpreting; quality assessment; strategic omission; cognitive effect
