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2.4 Difficulties of simultaneous interpreting, with a special focus 
on English as a source language 
In this section, I will focus on the difficulties of simultaneous interpreting. As 
mentioned in Gile’s Effort Model, each Effort demands resources to work properly. 

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There are different kinds of operations that could make processing demands 
exceed the available capacity, leading to deterioration in the content and/or the 
form of the interpretation. As interpreters generally work at the limits of their 
cognitive capacities (Gile, 1999), these information overflows are common. In this 
study, I decided to work on different items of the English language that, in my 
opinion, may be difficult for interpreters working from English into French. These 
items can be found in different languages even though some of them are specific 
to English, and are the following: numbers, proper names, complex noun phrases, 
culture-specific items, idioms, phrasal verbs and single-word terms. Each 
subsection will provide an analysis that describes the potential difficulties of this 
type of items and suggest some strategies to cope with those difficulties. 
2.4.1 Numbers 
In everyday practice, conference interpreters admit having some difficulties with 
numbers, with error rates reaching 40% for professional interpreters and 40% to 
70% for trainees (Korpal, 2016; Korpal & Stachowiak, 2018; Timarová, 2012 in 
Collard & Defrancq, 2018). It can be surprising that numbers are such a source of 
problems as their main characteristic is univocity of meaning (Alessandrini, 1990). 
Their interpretation should be quite easy. In most modern languages, the system 
developed to create numbers makes it possible to create all numbers using a 
small set of basic words and fixed syntactic rules, each providing a single piece of 
information on the number. For example, in English, the main constituents are 
called base digits (0 to 9 in the decimal system), which can be used to creates two 
lexical classes: teens (eleven, twelve... nineteen) and tens (twenty, thirty... ninety). 
There is a fourth set of items, called multipliers, (hundred, thousand) used to mark 
the magnitude of the base digits. This system very often requires a lot of items and 
words to create a large number in the target language and therefore the problem 
encountered by interpreters can be a memory problem due to the need to 
remember many words for the expression of a single concept (Mazza, 2001). 
Numbers are thus characterized by high information density and also low 

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predictability, which requires the interpret to change strategies with respect to 
listening, memory and production (De Smet, Vandierendonck & Defrancq, 2018).
Even though interpreters broadly agree that numbers are particularly difficult to 
interpret, research on the topic is rather limited (Mead 2015: 287). If we look at 
studies on numbers, Gile mentions them several times in his works (1995, 1999) 
and highlights the difficulty of numbers in SI because of three different 
characteristics, which are mentioned by many other researchers: 
1) Low predictability (Braun and Clarici, 1996; Mazza, 2001; Pinochi, 2009, 
Mead, 2015): it increases the Listening and WM Efforts because the 
anticipation is rarely possible (Jones, 2002; Pinochi, 2009). The number 
expressed can only be understood once the speaker utters it, and 
anticipation is therefore almost impossible. 
2) Low redundancy: it also increases the Listening and WM Efforts because it 
is really important not to miss or forget them as they cannot be inferred from 
any element in the text (Gile, 1995: 108). 
3) High informative content (Alessandrini, 1990): sections with numbers 
increase processing capacity demands for all Efforts as the interpreter must 
process, remember and translate more information. 
These characteristics can explain the frequency of mistakes with numbers in SI, 
especially large numbers which are expressed using several words and can also 
explain why interpreters cannot use strategies such as paraphrasing or 
reformulation (Jones, 2002; Pinochi, 2009) as every component of a number is a 
unit that represents one meaning only. 
Some strategies can, however, be applied to reduce the number of errors linked to 
numbers. One possible solution to deal with numbers is the reduction of decalage, 
i.e. a shorter ear-voice span (EVS)
1
, which allows shorter retention in STM but 
faster restitution of the input and also allows the interpreter to stick as close as 
1
The ear-voice span is the time lag between a word uttered by the source speaker and the 
corresponding word uttered by the interpreter (Defrancq & Collard, 2018) 

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possible to the speaker. It is suggested that professional interpreters perform 
better than students when dealing with numbers because they keep a shorter EVS 
(Timarová et al., 2014). Gile (2008) finds this strategy logical because a short EVS 
means that the interpreter saves working memory capacity. Kalina (1992: 254) 
suggests another strategy which is approximation. It can be a useful strategy to 
deal with particularly complex segments. She thinks this strategy can be used to 
provide partial information until the interpreter finds a more accurate translation, 
but this might be counterproductive for numbers as strategies to gain time 
increase the WM Effort.
Finally, since the main problem with numbers seem to be insufficient WM, writing 
the numbers down while interpreting might also be a good strategy (Mead, 2015; 
Setton, 1999). Despite the fact that note-taking can represent another Effort which 
will want its share of the total attentional capacity, it might relieve pressure on WM.
A few studies (Crevatin, 1991; Braun & Clarici, 1996) have focused on the 
management of numerals in SI and the usefulness of note-taking. They showed 
that notes were useful for numbers during the interpretation into the A-language 
even though the performance of professional interpreters and students was 
relatively poor. Furthermore, the language pair was not the same as in this 
dissertation, namely Italian-English or Italian-German for the two studies 
mentioned. However, Mazza carried out another study (2001), which showed that 
taking notes when dealing with large numbers (four digits or more) did not help the 
interpreter because large numbers are often too dense to be rightly noted.