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Single-word terms are the second most frequent category, with 34 occurrences 
(9.31%), followed by numbers, with 31 occurrences (8.49%), proper names 
(4.38%), culture-specific items, idioms and finally, phrasal verbs. These last three 
categories are the least frequent, totalling 19 occurrences all together, 
representing 5.20% of all difficulties.
Some of the difficult items did not occur in 
some of the source speeches, such as culture-specific items in the first and 
second source speech and phrasal verbs in the second source speech. In the 
following analyses, I will focus on the most frequent difficult items, namely complex 
noun phrases, single-word terms, numbers and proper names. 
In the difficulty profiles presented in Table 5, all the difficult items were taken into 
consideration, regardless of whether they were repeated (i.e. used several times in 
a speech) or not. This corresponds to an analysis of so-called tokens. However, 
for my thesis, I believe that it is more interesting to focus on hapax legomena
4
. 
They are defined as “linguistic expressions with only one attested occurrence and 
whose meaning is often, therefore, difficult to ascertain” (Bussman, 1996: 500). In 
other words, hapaxes are words that only occur once in a single text or corpus 
(Lardilleux & Lepage, 2007). If we analyzed tokens, the analysis could be biased 
as the interpreter trainee may use a different strategy when a given token is used 
again in the same speech. Therefore, recurring items were removed from the 
database. However, it is important to note that I relied on the first part of the 
definition given by Lardilleux & Lepage (2007), i.e. occurring only once “in a single 
text”, because there are three items that occur in more than one speech. I decided 
to keep these three items because it can be interesting to see if trainees’ outputs 
differ from one speech to another. Here are the three items: vision (single-word 
term in IN01 and IN02), hearing (single-word term in IN01, IN02 and IN04) and 
Lord Reith (proper name in IN02 and IN04). Table 6 shows the number of hapaxes 
for each difficulty in the four source speeches, with the recurring items removed.
4
From the Greek hapax legomenon “which has been uttered once”. The plural hapaxes will be 
used for convenience. 

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Data and methodology 
 
page 50 
Table 6 – Difficulty profile of the source speeches (hapaxes) 
IN01 
IN02 
IN03 
IN04