Chunking in simultaneous interpreting: the impact of task complexity and translation directionality on lexical bundles.

This study explored the use of phraseological frames (p-frames), a type of lexical bundle, by simultaneous interpreters as a strategy for managing cognitive loads. Specifically, using a comparable corpus of United Nations Security Council conferences, the study employed kfNgram to automatically identify the p-frames, and investigated their variations, regarding frequency, fixedness, structures, and functions among L1, L1-L2, and L2-L1 texts, which differ in cognitive loads due to task complexity and directionality of interpreting. The findings indicated that interpreters used more p-frames as cognitive loads increased; No significant difference was identified in fixedness as all texts tended to employ heavily formulaic and relatively fixed p-frames.