I’ve worked for more than 30 years as a translator, interpreter and language trainer. During that time, I’ve worked professionally with European languages including French, Spanish, German, Polish and Greek. All those languages are similar in the way clauses are arranged in a complex sentence: a complement clause comes after the verb it complements (“I know you’re hiding something”), a relative clause comes after the noun it modifies (“all the places I’ve been”), etc. The same is largely true of Hungarian and Finnish, which I’ve studied and worked with as well. I’ve also worked with languages which are very different from European languages in complex sentence structure, including Turkish and Mandarin, and I’ve studied Japanese. Time and again I’ve seen myself and other experienced colleagues struggle to transfer the structure of complex sentences between such languages and European ones.

I’ve seen translators of such languages struggle to manage trade-offs between structural accuracy and readability. I’ve seen translations into such languages contain sentences with so many nested structures that they’re very hard to understand. I’ve seen European language translators start working well from a new European language after studying it for a year or two, while finding it hard to work from a structurally very different language even after many years of study.

I’ve seen this difficulty even more in simultaneous interpretation. I learned Hungarian – a hard language, but one with sentence structure heavily influenced by that of other European languages – after the age of 40, and interpreted decently from it for years. I have a much harder time interpreting from Turkish – a language with very different complex sentence structure from that of European languages – although I’ve spoken it fluently for decades. I perceive that difficulty as being due to complex sentences with so many parts that need to be scrambled and repackaged that they can seem impossible to reproduce in real time. Colleagues describe similar experiences.

In simultaneous interpretation between structurally very different languages, the result can all too often be omissions, generalizations or distortions. But structural mistakes can be surprisingly common in written translation between such languages as well. Translators who are skilled at conveying meaning and feeling accurately, appropriately and naturally between European languages can stumble when translating complex sentences in a structurally very different pair. I spent years revising translations into English, and constantly saw the same types of structural problem when those translations were from Turkish, Mandarin or sometimes Hungarian. In my experience, translations without parsing problems between structurally very different languages, even when done by experienced professionals, seem to be the exception rather than the rule.

That experience is my motivation for this study, which examines translation and interpretation between English and languages from five other families. The main question the study seeks to answer is whether structural difference in a language pair is associated with rates for indicators of difficulty in translating or interpreting complex sentences in that pair. If so, a related question is whether there are differences in those associations between the three modes of language transfer considered – legal translation, subtitle translation and simultaneous interpretation.

This study hopes to be of interest to anyone involved in translation or interpretation practice or research.