Remote simultaneous interpreters’ interaction with multimodal workplace: An observational study

As interpreting goes increasingly technologized (Pöchhacker & Liu, 2024), remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI) has been gaining momentum in the interpreting industry and academia. Research on RSI has flourished regarding interpreters’ subjective experience in their professional undertakings (e.g., Buján & Collard, 2022; Chmiel & Spinolo, 2022), yet the question of how they handle multimodal information in a technologized workplace environment remains largely indeterminate. As simultaneous interpreting (SI) has been considered a complex cognitive activity, the cognitive process of SI has been a central line of inquiry. The technologized workplace environment calls for a renewed reflection on interpreter cognition (Mellinger, 2023). This is particularly pertinent to RSI when it is considered a form of “multilectal mediated communication” (Halverson & Muñoz, 2021, p. 3) rather than mere language processing. Taking situated cognition as an epistemological base, I contend that this framework may capture the complex nature of interpreter cognition in RSI: cognitive process is a result of interaction among the interpreter’s mind, bodily actions, and technologized multimodal workplace environment. In this paper, I will report on a qualitative observational study of three professional interpreters’ real-life RSI assignments. Data was collected in two phases using field observations, screen recording, and semi-structured interviews. All data was analyzed through qualitative coding, and selected video excerpts were subject to multimodal micro-analysis to provide richer interpretations. Results showed that interpreters interact with two cognitive spaces in the RSI workplace – ‘communicative space’ and ‘augmented space’. The communicative space is a workspace offering multimodal input for cognitive processing, while the augmented space features interpreters’ self-driven creation of a multimodal workspace to support cognitive processing. The study also found that interpreters encounter multimodal challenges (i.e., insufficient view of the speaker and multimodal misalignment) in the communicative space and tend to rise to the challenges using multimodal resources in the augmented space. Moreover, in-depth interviews suggested that automatic speech recognition (ASR) on RSI platforms could be a potentially useful augmented multimodal resource, but to a limited degree. This observational study theorizes interpreters' interaction with the RSI workplace through a multimodal, cognitive lens. As part of a larger-scale project, this study may also provide new angles for examining cognitive effort and studying multimodal processing in (R)SI.