Simultaneous interpretation (SI) and translation are different in many ways, albeit, at deep structure level, they involve the common nature of conveying meaning in one language to another. These differences between the two modes of communication include the comprehension process, the extent of multi-processing, anticipation, time pressure, and the quality of the final production. To examine this question, simultaneously interpreted Korean version and translated texts of an American Presidential Debate were analysed. The total number of syllables in the SI version proved to be 92% of the original English speech while the translated version had 160% of the same speech. No statistically significant difference between the number of syllables in the SI and translation versions at sentence level was found when the sentences in which no SI was performed were excluded from the calculation. This shows that interpreters try to utter as many syllables as possible to convey the meaning once they succeed in processing a certain segment. Correlations between the number of syllables in the original speech and the translation at sentence level were higher (r=0.87, p<0.05) than in the original speech while SI was (r=0.47, p<0.05). A graph demonstrates that the translation/original speech ratio pattern was consistent around 150% while the SI/original speech ratio fluctuated much. In the translated version, there was little loss of detail while the SI omitted portions of the speech and left some sentences awkward and incomplete. It would be reasonable to attribute this loss to the extreme multi-processing involved in SI rather than to the incompetence of interpreters.
