Grammatical Difficulties in Understanding Oral Texts

Grammatical forms and syntactical constructions cannot be isolated from the lexical items they consist of. Therefore, in real life most translation/interpretation transformations (such as addition, omission, transposition, replacement, antonymic translation, compensation, compression, expansion, etc) are complex techniques and include both lexical and grammatical components. In practice interpreting begins only after the interpreter has perceived meanings of the words (so that they make sense) and "unpacked" grammatical structures of the SL message. Researchers in the field of written translation and consecutive interpretation have observed that failures to translate messages correctly are seldom caused by grammatical factors, especially if the languages involved belong to the European family. However in simultaneous interpreting certain problems may be caused by the difference in the SL and TL syntactic structures, first of all, in the word order, which in Ukrainian and Russian is often reversed so that focus is made on the rheme of the utterance, whilst the Standard English declarative sentences have a fixed order of words. Interpreters, especially beginners, may also have problems with "hearing" and, therefore, rendering of the English articles, Perfect tense forms of the verb and forms expressing unreality (oblique moods), affirmative and negative constructions. Although grammatical factors cause fewer problems than the lexical ones, still interpreters have to be aware of certain potential threats listed below.