AWEJ for Translation & Literary Studies, Volume 10. Number 2. May 2026 Pp. 2-16
Department of Healthcare Administration,
College of Medicine and Science, Mayo Clinic
Rochester, Minnesota, United States
This study investigates the occurrence of two commonly researched translation shifts; simplification and explicitation, in the context of Arabic–English simultaneous conference interpreting, examining whether these translation-related shifts are systematically reflected in interpreted discourse as well and to what extent. While simplification and explicitation have been widely studied in written translation (Baker, 1993; Laviosa, 1997, 1998; Blum & Levenston, 1978; Pastor et al., 2008), their realization in real-time interpreting has received comparatively less scholarly attention. This study addresses this gap by offering a corpus-based, empirical analysis of these phenomena in Arabic–English simultaneous conference interpreting, a context that remains underrepresented in existing research. It also offers a replicable methodological framework for examining translation shifts in interpreted discourse. This study employs a comparable corpus design comprising an Arabic source corpus, an English interpreted corpus, and a reference corpus of original English conference discourse derived from United Nations audio-visual library. The finalized dataset includes 22 audio files (11 source speeches and 11 interpreted renditions). The study analyzed four quantitative indicators: average sentence length and lexical density as measures of simplification, and wordcount and readability score as indicators of explicitation. Independent-samples t-tests revealed no statistically significant differences between the target corpus and the reference corpus for average sentence length and lexical density, providing no evidence of simplification in the interpreted output relative to native English discourse. In contrast, paired-samples t-tests showed a statistically significant increase in wordcount and a significant decrease in readability scores in the target corpus compared to the source corpus, indicating greater explicitness and increased accessibility in interpreted renditions. Taken together, the findings provide strong evidence for explicitation in simultaneous interpreting, while offering no empirical support for simplification as measured in this study. These results suggest that explicitation is a robust tendency in interpreter-mediated discourse, although its manifestation may also reflect structural differences between Arabic and English in addition to the cognitive and temporal constraints of real-time processing.
Al-Khatib, A. Z. (2026). Simplification and Explicitation in Simultaneous Interpreting: Evidence from a Corpus of Arabic–English Conference Interpreting. Arab World English Journal for Translation & Literary Studies. 10. (2): 2-16
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Ahmad Z. Al-Khatib holds a Ph.D. in Translation Studies from Kent State University. He is a certified medical interpreter and serves as an Instructor in Healthcare Administration at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science. His research focuses on healthcare communication, interpreter-mediated interactions, and AI-mediated language access in clinical settings. His work integrates corpus linguistics, interpreting studies, and health equity to advance multilingual healthcare practices.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9464-0217