Additions in simultaneous signed interpreting

Abstract Until now, investigations of strategies used by signed language interpreters in the simultaneous mode have been sporadic and restricted to analyses of short transcripts. This article presents the first corpus-driven exploration of interpreter additions in news broadcasts simultaneously interpreted into South African Sign Language. Using grounded theory, it explores the types of additions made, the reasons for their production, and their downstream consequences. The results show that interpreters mainly add discourse markers, linguistic extrapolations such as filling in ellipsis and obvious co-text, repetitions, contextual information, and to a lesser extent, second translations, pragmatic markers, and new information. However, the cost is high as additions often result in concomitant omissions and occasional incoherence. From the results, a model is extrapolated to explain additions in terms of the interpreter’s perceived roles and status in the Deaf community.