Abstract (eng)
This master’s thesis investigates the production of interferences in sight translations in the language pair German-Italian. The main research question is if and in what way the production of interferences in interpreting varies depending on the age of second language acquisition.
The empirical study is based on theories from linguistics, translation studies and interpreting studies. The first part reviews the literature on the following issues: the characteristics of sight interpreting; the issue of bilinguality; and the concept of interference. An interference typology, which is specific for the language pair German-Italian, was developed, as no such typology is available in the literature. This typology enables measuring the occurrences of interferences and describing their regularities. It draws on interference typologies from interpreting studies and considerations about the language pair German-Italian from contrastive linguistics.
The data was collected in an experimental setting including a subsequent questionnaire. The data was quantitatively analysed based on the interference typology developed. Results show that early bilinguals produced on average more interferences than late bilinguals. In addition, there are significant differences in the types of interferences produced by the two groups. For instance, some types of interferences only occurred in one group but not the other. As the data sample was rather small, however, further studies are required to confirm the results.