Available at

5
CONCLUSION .............................................................................................. 93
6
APPENDICES ............................................................................................... 95
6.1
A
PPENDIX 
1:
STUDIES ON INTERPRETING BASED ON AUTHENTIC CORPORA 
(S
ETTON
,
2011) .................................................................................................. 95
6.2
A
PPENDIX 
2:
C
ONSENT FORMS
.................................................................. 99
6.3
A
PPENDIX 
3:
T
REE
T
AGGER TAGSET DESCRIPTION 
(E
NGLISH
) ..................... 107
6.4
A
PPENDIX 
4:
T
REE
T
AGGER TAGSET DESCRIPTION 
(F
RENCH
) ...................... 110
7
BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................... 113

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Introduction 
 
page 7 
Introduction 
As an interpreter trainee at the UCLouvain, I directly understood why conference 
interpreting is considered a hard task. It takes a lot to be a good interpreter and to 
achieve that goal as students need to master different skills, as much in 
consecutive interpreting and in simultaneous interpreting. These skills could be 
divided into two main categories: content related, and non-content related. For 
example, non-content related skills are good intonation/tone/volume, the ability to 
avoid disfluencies such as repetitions, self-corrections or silent pauses. I think it is 
really important to take all these aspects into consideration and to work on them 
during the master as they account for a part of the interpreter job. However, the 
skills I am most interested in are content related skills, especially transfers from 
one language to another. My two passive languages are English and Spanish, and 
I work from these two into French, my mother tongue. Working from English or 
Spanish into French are two different things as languages are constructed 
differently. I am personally more comfortable working from English into French, 
which is why I decided to focus on the English-French language pair for the 
present study. 
As previously stated, transfers from one language to another has really captivated 
my interest. For this reason, I have chosen to focus on linguistic difficulties in 
simultaneous interpreting, which is the mode of interpreting I wanted to investigate 
as it is more challenging for me than consecutive interpreting. In addition, 
throughout my master at the Louvain School of Translation and Interpreting (LSTI), 
I have had the chance to follow courses on the use of corpora in the fields of 
translation and interpreting. In the recent years, an increasing number of corpus-
based interpreting studies have been carried out, and I wanted to carry out my 
own corpus-based interpreting study. There have also been many studies focusing 
on interpreting quality assessment or teaching simultaneous interpreting, which 
are two aspects I also wanted to talk about in the present study. 

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Introduction 
 
page 8 
This thesis focuses on the linguistic items that are potentially challenging for 
interpreter trainees (and professional interpreters) and aims to shed light on the 
most challenging linguistic item(s) and on the quality of students’ performances 
across time. Chapter 1 presents an overview of corpus-based interpreting studies 
(CIS) and is divided into four main parts: the history of the field, the corpus 
compilation, recent research orientations in the field and the future prospects of 
the field. In Chapter 2, the focus is on teaching simultaneous interpreting (SI). The 
history of teaching SI is first discussed, Gile’s Effort Model is then presented, 
followed with an analysis of seven difficult linguistic items in SI, with a special 
focus on English as a source language. This last part of the chapter is devoted to 
the two research questions. Chapter 3 presents the methodology used in the 
present study and gives details about the database. The analysis of three global 
features, namely delivery rate, expansion rate and lexical density, are presented in 
Chapter 4, as well as the results of the data analysis. The aim of this chapter is to 
be able to answer the two research questions. Finally, Chapter 5 is about the 
conclusions drawn from this study carried out on interpreter trainees and about the 
possible future research and pedagogical applications. 

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Corpus-based interpreting studies 
 
page 9