Error correction. There are occasions when interpreters make clear mistakes for many different reasons such as wrong anticipation, not hearing a word at all, misunderstanding the speaker’s implicit ideas, or misunderstanding a word or a phrase. According to Jones if an interpreter makes a mistake, there are different possible scenarios. First, Jones believes that if the mistake is insignificant and makes no material difference, the interpreter should not waste time trying to fix it. Second, if the mistake is made on a significant point of the speech, but somehow it becomes obvious to the interpreter that the audience has noticed the mistake and worked out what the correct rendition must be, then it is not necessary to correct the mistake. However, Jones believes that correcting the mistake is recommended only if the interpreter can fix it quickly.
Transcoding M.Bartlomiejczyk describes transcoding as a word-for-word rendition or almost word-for-word rendition. In this case the interpreter is very faithful to the source text, relying on its surface structure often because the interpreter does not understand completely or partially what the speaker meant by one of the segments of the speech. Al-Salman and Al-Khanji refer to this strategy as literal interpretation and they describe it as a strategy in which the interpreter uses a target language equivalent to the source language word «irrespective of contextual adequacy»
Incomplete sentence strategy. When this strategy is applied by interpreters, the result will be unfinished messages due to unfinished rendition that is cut short in the middle of the sentence. AlSalman and Al-Khanji explain that «this strategy occurs when the interpreter takes too much time trying to find equivalent expressions but fails to do so before additional input must be interpreted».
The strategic behavior of interpreters is a recurrent object of research into SI. Some studies examine the use of single, specific strategies such as anticipation (Lederer 1978; Moser 1978 Wilss 1978) while others adopt an overall approach (Kirchhoff 1976; Kohn and Kalina 1996; Kalina 1998). Gile (1995) uses the term of ‘coping tactics’ to refer to conscious solutions implemented by the interpreter to contrast processing capacity overload and knowledge base inadequacy.
The most common categorization distinguishes between comprehension, production, overall and emergency strategies. Comprehension strategies generally include, anticipation, segmentation, selection of information, stalling or waiting, while production strategies consist of compression, expansion, approximation strategies, generalization, use of linguistic open-end forms, morphosyntactic transformation and the use of prosody elements, such as pauses and intonation. Décalage and monitoring are counted among the overall strategies, while emergency strategies may include, for example, the omission of text segments, transcoding and parallel reformulation. As for every classification, strategy categories are not always homogeneous among researchers and sometimes the borders between comprehension and production or production and emergency strategies are blurred. The category ‘production strategies’ is, comprehensibly, the largest category, because it is made up of all occurrences noted comparing the ST with the IT.
If strategies are to be considered a viable tool for pointing to the transfer mechanisms intervening during the SI process and the results achieved, then, of course, categories will be open and can host numerous other strategies, depending on the kind of interpreting solution examined.
In a study comparing reformulation strategies in consecutive and simultaneous interpretation, Messner (2000) expanded the category additions to take into account discourse markers – connectives, rhetorical phrases, fillers – typical of spoken language. Some of the subclasses were, for example, markers of text segmentation (so, in this respect), markers stressing focal elements (exactly, correct, that is, I mean) markers signaling reformulation (in other words) and markers for modulation operations (to soften or strengthen the impact, maybe, sure, really), necessary to analyze and specify the various additions encountered.