2. Structural difference and difficulty
2.1. The branching direction of subordinate clauses
Two attached clauses can be in a relation of syntactic coordination or subordination. There are three broad categories of subordinate clause generally investigated cross-linguistically: relative, complement and adverbial clauses (Gast and Diessel 2012: 1).
A typology of languages in terms of the typical branching direction of relative clauses is given by Dryer (2013) in the World Atlas of Language Structures. Dryer (2007) also provides a typology of languages in terms of the typical branching direction of relative and adverbial clauses. Schmidtke-Bode and Diessel (2017) classify languages in terms of the typical branching direction of complement clauses. Diessel (2001) does the same for the typical branching direction of adverbial clauses.
According to the above classifications, most Indo-European languages have typically right-branching relative and complement clauses, and adverbial clauses which typically branch either way. Among Indo-European languages, there are smaller-scale differences between the majority which typically place the verb after the subject (like English), a smaller group which typically place the verb at the end of a clause (like Persian) and a few where the typical place of the verb in a clause depends on the type of clause (like German). But that distinction applies to the order of elements within a clause and therefore operates on a more local scale than the difference in typical branching direction of subordinate clauses, which is the main independent variable analyzed in this study.
Following the typological classifications cited above, Table 1 shows the typical branching direction of the three major types of subordinate clause, in the six languages considered in this study.
Table 1
Typical branching direction of subordinate clauses
| Language | Relative clause | Complement clause | Adverbial clause |
| English | right | right | either |
| Russian | right | right | either |
| Hungarian | either | right | either |
| Turkish | left | left | left |
| Mandarin | left | right | left |
| Japanese | left | left | left |
2.2 Structural difference and difficulty in translation
Translators who work between languages with very different structure can perceive that difference as a major source of production difficulty, independently of the processing difficulty associated with a given text. That perception is supported by a growing body of research.
Some of that research involves translation between different European languages. Experiments reported by Vanroy (2021: 155) associate linear and hierarchical differences in corresponding word groups with difficulty in English-to-Dutch translation, concluding that “diverging syntactic properties between a source and target unit cause increased translation difficulty.” In studies of translation from English into Danish, German and Spanish, Bangalore et al. (2015; 2016) find that differently ordered syntax is associated with higher cognitive load, as reflected in reading time per source word, response time and total translation time.
Other analyses of translation difficulty involve translation between European and Asian languages. Carl and Schaeffer (2017: 55) find much higher degrees of syntactic variation between English and Japanese or Hindi than between English and Danish, Spanish or German, which they say makes the translation process much “more difficult and time-consuming.” Zou (2016: 190) finds that the most difficult aspect of English-Mandarin translation is the translation of long, complex sentences, due to “difference in phrases and sentence structures.” In a study involving Mandarin and seven European langugages, Wong (2006: 124) concludes that “translating between the European languages is much easier than translating between Chinese and any one of the European languages,” with structural difference being a greater factor of difficulty than differences in vocabulary or culture. In his view, “this is because the translator is, during the translation process, constantly dealing with syntax in two directions: the syntax of the source language on the one hand and the syntax of the target language on the other.”
2.3 Structural difference and difficulty in interpretation
Difficulty associated with structural difference between languages has been an increasing topic of research into simultaneous interpretation, because of the burden which that difference can place on an interpreter’s working memory.
Nowhere is that difficulty more strongly questioned than in Seleskovitch and Lederer’s (1989) influential théorie du sens or interpretive theory. Central to that theory is the notion of “deverbalizing” – processing a message through a language-free stage between understanding and reformulation. The interpretive theory maintains that simultaneous interpretation “hardly differs from one language pair to the next” (p. 137). That view is supported by pointing to interpretation between German and other European languages: “The success of simultaneous interpretation [from German into French] shows the validity of the interpretive method applied to a syntactically very different language pair” (p. 149).
The interpretive theory maintains that observations of interpretation between languages like English, French and German can be extrapolated to interpretation in any language pair. But other researchers disagree. They argue that major differences in the linear relations between clauses may make complex sentences in some language pairs resistant to structurally accurate and coherent translation or interpretation. It’s this aspect of discourse, the “constraint of linearity,” which, in their view, the interpretive theory disregards (Gumul and Łyda 2007; Shlesinger 2014).
In that view, non-linguistic processing, though useful as a conceptual guideline for interpreters, may not be able to obviate major differences in the order in which information is presented in a sentence, especially if the sentence has many subordinate clauses. Chomsky (2003) sees the clause as constituting a unit of logical processing, or “phase.” In a study of interpreters’ ability to recall the form of a sentence they’ve just interpreted, Isham (1994: 195) finds that interpreters have a greater tendency to process information clause by clause than sentence by sentence, suggesting that “interpreters use the clause as their default unit of processing.”
Setton (1993: 238) is critical of the interpretive theory, which he says has come in for increasing criticism, “especially from the Japanese sphere […] Apart from […] the perceived ‘naively empirical’ nature of the theory, […] cultural and linguistic factors are […] swept aside by (largely […] uninformed) dogma in support of the theory’s universality.” Setton (1999: 54) says: “Outside the [interpretive theory], almost all writers […] with the relevant experience consider [interpretation from a left-branching language into a right-branching one] to present particular problems.” Setton and Motta (2007: 205) consider that “the famous notion of ‘deverbalization’ […] has never been formulated with enough precision to satisfy everybody, or perhaps to be properly tested.” According to Gile (2009: 198), “while the relevance of language-specificity in interpreting has not been demonstrated empirically, arguments in favour of the hypothesis are strong,” especially due to “syntactic differences between the source language and the target language in simultaneous interpreting.”
As explained above, German is typologically similar to other Indo‑European languages in terms of the typical branching direction of subordinate clauses. Despite this large-scale structural similarity, many studies explore specific difficulties associated with interpretation between German and other European languages.
In an overview of German-English simultaneous interpretation, Wilss (1978: 343) suggests that “languages with predominantly parallel syntactic patterning, e.g. English and French, demand less syntactic restructuring than do languages which differ considerably in structure, e.g. German and English,” concluding that “transfer on the basis of parallel syntactic structures can […] be regarded as easier to accomplish.” In a study of German-to-English interpretation, Seeber and Kerzel (2012: 238) find that “cognitive load during simultaneous interpreting of syntactically asymmetrical structures increased. These results are at odds with a universalist view of interpreting, according to which structural differences of the languages involved are irrelevant to the process.”
The works cited above suggest that simultaneous interpretation of comparable speeches may be more difficult in language pairs like English-German or Italian-German than in language pairs like English-Italian or English-French, for reasons specific to the structural difference of those language pairs. But that structural difference mostly involves the order of elements within a clause. So it’s on a more local scale than the major differences which divide Indo-European languages from languages in several other families in terms of the branching direction of subordinate clauses. If local differences in the internal structure of a clause may be associated with increased production difficulty in translation or interpretation, it seems reasonable to expect that much larger-scale typological differences may be associated with greater degrees of production difficulty.
To date, little empirical research has been done on difficulty associated with structural difference in simultaneous interpretation between languages with large-scale differences in structure.
Gile (2011: 34) reports on a study comparing interpretation of an English speech into French, German and Japanese. He finds that “there were more errors and omissions in the Japanese renderings than in either the German or French renderings,” concluding that this is “consistent with the tightrope hypothesis, according to which interpreters tend to work close to cognitive saturation, which also makes language-specific and language-pair-specific idiosyncrasies relevant parameters in the interpreting process.”
Ahn (2005) finds that complex sentences can’t be interpreted with sustained accuracy and coherence from Korean into English, analyzing two types of syntactic management strategy which distort “perspective coherence.”
In a study of English-Mandarin interpretation, Wang and Gu (2016) find a high frequency of unnatural pauses, errors and inaccuracies, which they see as indicators of difficulty associated with “structural asymmetry” in that language pair.