Cursul 3 (doua parti) : Interpretarea ca act de comunicare Actul de interpretare ca act de comunicare Definitie, domeniu de aplicare Interpretarea = act

de comunicare realizat intre doua sau mai multe comunitati lingvistice in care vorbitorul vorbeste intr-o limba iar auditoriul are la dispozitie serviciul de interpretare prin care mesajul este transmis in limba inteleasa de auditoriu (limba-tinta). Interpretul mediaza asadar transmiterea mesajului prin actul interpretarii prin care transfera sensul dintr-o limba in alta. Acest act se numeste interpretare pentru ca presupune mai intai intelegerea sensului in limba-sursa, apoi prelucrarea si redarea acestuia in limba-tinta, cu alte cuvinte, interpretul este dator sa asculte si sa fie fidel sensului decodat spre a-l reda intocmai auditoriului. Interpretul-traducator recurge la propriile deprinderi si cunostinte pentru a performa cat mai corect, verosimil si adecvat mesajul. Interpretarea, fie consecutiva, fie simultana este o abordare de mediere pentru intelegerea si convertirea mesajului verbal dintre participantii la comunicare. Mediatorul este interpretatul, caruia ii revin responsabilitati importante (in primul rand intelegerea corecta a mesajului si redarea lui cu fidelitate). * The interpreters role in the act of conveying the message from one language into another is so much the more relevant as it is not always explicitly acknowledged by the beneficiaries of this kind of service. One possible explanation is that in todays rapid-changing conditions, the conference organizers or even those who are more directly involved in holding and running a conference are not aware of what interpreters really do while they sit in their booths with headphones and a microphone in front, if by chance they are ever noticed there. Of course, a tolerant but cognisant person would say that as long as a conference goes well, it does not matter whether the interpreters presence is noticed or not. This is true, but it will only be acceptable in an ideal situation where everything has been perfectly organised and managed the speakers did their job as well as the interpreters, that is they would have spoken clearly, freely, always into the mike, without reading from their notes, in perfect command of the language of expression, etc., etc. a really ideal world of perfectly conducted conferences which is currently created in mock- rather than in live conferences. In order to make such smooth conferences happen, a good communication and interaction between the interpreters and the event stakeholders must be provided. This type of communication does not necessarily mean speaking to one another or exchanging information, although this approach is not excluded from the communication chain; it merely means a good management of the communication cycle: conveying relevant information at the right time, to the right person(s), through the right channel and providing checking and feedback techniques so as to identify potential errors or discontinuities. In the specific case of interpretation, the conference stakeholders will necessarily include the speakers proper and their printed matter (if any), the technical environment manager and the liaising person who connects the running of the conference to the interpretation service and viceversa. What is essential in this maize is the content of the topic to be discussed during the conference and the extent to which this aspect is covered for the interpreters, i.e. the accessibility of documentation and information materials for the interpreters. In the information era where we all live nowadays, this does not seem to be a problem and this is indeed so provided the people who organize conferences do not forget that interpretation service is not automatic, it is put in place by human beings - not by computers 1. Moreover, the conference stakeholders
I came across someone who pronounced the candid statement about interpretation: traducerea merge, as if interpretation were some mechanism that could run when switching on the button. A second most telling example is more serious, if not worrying: a seminar was about to start one morning in a hotel conference hall, everything was put in place, including the booth for interpretation, the moderator even started off, and after half an hour, the conference organizer came to the technician and asked him in a somewhat puzzled voice: why isnt translation working? The technician simply said that there was no one in the booth, therefore there was no translation, no one translating for the listeners. The organiser was stunned to find out that for interpretation to take place, he/she would have had to provide not only the equipment but the interpreters too...finally they tried to do it by themselves and one hour later the whole event collapsed for lack of interpreters, more precisely for lack of knowledge about how things had to be managed (this is a true, so much the more a no comment story).
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should be trained as to what kind of work interpreters are supposed to do in order to understand that such work is far from being automatic and is equally demanding and accountable if done professionally. Some recent research has been done on possibilities to automate interpretation, but not concrete results have been recorded as yet. In a short article published in the first review of Interpreting, an international journal of research and practice in interpreting, the authors discuss the development of a project focused on interpretation as a state-of-the-art-process. This project comprises at least two basic components: MT (Machine Translation) and MI (Machine Interpretation) that are structurally and pragmatically different from a simulation programme for human translation and human interpretation. The sample solution offered for human interpretation (HI) was the VERBMOBIL project, a project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Technology, which is a long-term project on the translation of speech within negotiation dialogues. Apart from the IT characteristics and criteria used in this project (i.e. speaker-adaptive recognition of spontaneous speech negotiation dialogues in face-to-face situations), Speech Act Theory was one of the theoretical foundations of the experiment as it is the theory that most conveniently applies to the analysis of dialogues. Dialogues can be analysed in terms of their propositional content and their illocutionary force. The propositional content of an utterance is determined by the factual information contained in the speech segment. According to Austin (1962) and Searle (1969), Speech Act Theory is a powerful framework for identifying the relevant pieces of discourse in natural language processing. Given its philosophical foundations, the theory can be used in the investigation of a wide range of discourse phenomena, CI or SI included. In this particular case, the theory must be adapted to the needs of a limited domain such as either of the above-mentioned. In achieving the transfer of data from the source-language into the target language system, a formal relation between the two representations is used and this formal link is logically established by means of the well-known DRT (Discourse Representation Theory, see Kamp&Reyle, 1992) approach. In VERBMOBIL this logical form contains many features of the source-language expression and it is sufficiently underspecified so as to leave enough room for the interpretation of utterances2. However complex and all-encompasing this endeavour might be, the VERBMOBIL scenario is not able to provide a full-fledged production into the TL speak of the SL message uttered in actual talk-situation. Researchers are still looking for ways of integrating full and partial analyses into the project architecture. What is relevant is that further insights into the strategies that are identified in human interpreting may lead to new possible combinations of exegetic models. Summing up, we can assume that Interpretation whether consecutive or simultaneous is an act of verbal communication which occurs post hoc or at the same time of the speech act proper, with a view to facilitating comprehension of messages. in languages other than the original, or the source language. Interpretation is in many ways similar to translation, but it is only oral and it resorts to techniques and skills that are different from those of a translator. Interpretation is fundamentally based on listening and then on speaking out the comprehended message. In an attempt to dissociate the various stages of interpretation, D. Seleskovitch and A. Lederer (1986) define consecutive interpretation as a process consisting of three different stages: ... un modele a trois etapes qui vaut bien pour la traduction des textes contemporains que pour linterpretation des discours: 1) comprendre la langue; 2) comprendre le sens, 3) restituer le sens. 1.1. Brief historical overview and scope of Interpretation The very beginnings of interpretation date as far back as human kind, but the modern approach to interpretation took a relatively regular shape within the UNO framework and is intrinsically related with the process of Nrenberg, when the bases of SI as a technique of conveying a message instantaneously were practically laid. Before this period, during the two world wars, Consecutive Interpretation (CI) and the so-called Chuchotage were the extensive methods used by interpreters who not incidentally - were chosen from among former or current diplomats3. Communication was thus made possible by way of a kind of liaising from one language into another, alternatively. The basics of CI were laid by a pioneer in interpreting, the Swiss scholar and interpreter Jean Herbert, who was the first to conceive and publish a conceptual system of note-taking for CI. The function
For an ample discussion on Machine Interpretation, see the article by S. Jekat and A. Klein, published in Interpreting, International Journal of research and practice in interpreting, p. 7-20. 3 In an extensive monographic volume, issued by well-reputed Italian professional interpreters and academia, mention is made about the fact that throughout centuries, interpreters has always been involved in the state affairs and diplomatic missions so as to mediate talks between various political players (cf. Interpretazione simultanea e consecutiva, 1999: 10).
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of this system is to serve as an aide-mmoire for the consecutive interpretation during a rather lengthy speech which is expected to be translated or rendered into a different language for the listeners to understand the original content. As for SI, it was experimentally used for the first time by the UNO, soon after the inception of the second world war. J. Herbert recollects the way in which they all started interpreting at the time: .... trying our best to understand what came over loudspeakers and whispering into a sort of box called Hushaphone (cf. Herbert, 1978: 7). In November 1945, after the second world war, the trial of Nremberg started off and a whole system of SI was required so as to ensure translation during the hearings. There were as many as 402 sessions, 22 war criminals whose depositions and enquiries were all translated, including a plethora of lawyers and other important participants in this time-consuming and most significant, history-making event4. It goes without saying that this trial was amply publicized, therefore SI acquired utmost importance and interpreters became visible to the public in terms of what they provided for the audience. In a well-known review on translation and interpretation services, META (1985), Bowen&Bowen note: Language services at Nrenberg were provided not only for communication between the accused and the courts... but also for communication between the judges, none of whom understood and spoke the languages of all their colleagues, and, last but not least, for the benefit of the press and general audience5. The technical equipment used in the Nrenberg trial was an imported IBM experimental system specifically used for multilingual interpretation (four booths corresponding to four working languages, including the relay language). What is worth mentioning is that the interpreter could give a light signal to the speaker in case the speech was too speedy or incomprehensible for some reason, therefore, the speaker had to repeat what he had been saying. The direction of interpretation was always towards the mother tongue 6. The working conditions were tremendously difficult and stressful, given the political and juridical context. After this first experiment and experience, interpretation per se evolved consistently, even if somewhat differently on account of the political and cultural differences that were imposed by political treaties. In 1949 NATO was created and as a response to it, a few years later, in 1955, the Warsaw Pact was initiated by the USSR. Russian was the official language for the signatory countries of the Warsaw Treaty, while English was the official language for the NATO member states. These organizations and the Iron Curtain as a cultural and political-economic barrier had several repercussions on interpretation practice and on interpretation training as well. While in the Western communities this skill was promoted even at an academic level in various universities (Paris, London/Westminster, Geneva, Trieste), within a variety of specialized programmes, in the Eastern countries, such as Romania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic (former Czechoslovakia), Hungary, interpretation was not acknowledged as a specialized skill until the 70s. In the early 70s, as a result of the growing number of international conferences and congresses that were organized in Central and Eastern Europe, despite the still existing Iron Curtain, special training programmes were initiated by the UNO/UNESCO in such capital cities as Prague, Bucharest, Warsaw and elsewhere. Moscow University also provided a remarkable group of interpreters who had been trained in New York at the UNO. In Bucharest, for instance, under the aegis of the UNESCO/UNO, the Faculty of Foreign Languages of the University of Bucharest hosted a five-year training programme for students in interpretation during 1971 1976. It is important to note that given the lack of cultural communication between the West and the East, the Eastern practice and education in interpretation were equally focused on interpretation into A and into B. Retour and the constant effort of doing a good retour was the cornerstone of an interpreter-to-be, as the general perception was that interpreters would have to voice the Eastern officials speeches (of the respective ex-communist country) into a Western language, whether French, English, German or Spanish. Interpretation into Russian was understandably provided by native speakers, while interpretation into English or French was generally provided by very good professionals, generally by university professors from the Faculty of Foreign Languages. These
The hearings lasted until October the next year, 1946. This quotation originates in Interpretazione simultanea e consecutiva, 1999: 15. 6 According to the EU standards, an A language is the mother tongue, B is the foreign language that an interpreter masters perfectly so as to interpret into it as the case may be (doing retour), and C, D, etc. are the languages that an interpreter may acquire during his training and from which he/she can interpret into A, according to personal skills.
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were not free-lance interpreters, but they generally followed the AIIC guidelines and recommendations as far as the working conditions for interpreters were concerned. 1.2. History and more The interpreters status in the old days of interpreting, when the profession seemed to be a most promising career in its own right has gradually turned into a common but obviously well-reputed and appreciated job. Moreover, the practically huge service of interpretation existing within the EU (SCIC/JICS) both with the European Parliament, the European Court of Justice and the European Commission stands proof of the constant need of this service in a variety of negotiation meetings, whether political or not. The EU is a multilingual community, therefore interpretation will always be required at various levels. In Geneva a permanent work since its very foundation has been recorded with very positive results by the AIIC (Association Internationale des Interprtes de Confrence), a very active and highly professional organisation which advocated the protection of the interpreters professional rights and promoted long-life training and selftraining for interpreters. So, the professional conference interpreter is a well-established, well-defined and wellpaid job, a reason why many graduating students consider it attractive and basically worth pursuing, the more so as interpreting also exposes someone to a varied, sometimes challenging multicultural environment. What is still a kind of handicap for someone who indulges in the intention of becoming an interpreter is the tremendously huge amount of knowledge and skill that must be learned and practised before - so as to cope with all the possible challenges of interpretation. This means knowledge of and about what to expect in a conference situation. Cultural and linguistic knowledge must go hand in hand. On the other hand, the interpreter learns a lot during interpretation or as a result of interpreting; the learning process covers several aspects: social knowledge (meeting, knowing new people, speakers, listeners as part of the audience, organisers, etc.), content knowledge (i.e. information on the topics to be discussed during the conference, names of organisations, their acronyms, possible related topics, etc.), knowledge of and about the people involved, countries, recent history of the organisations involved etc. Interpretation is an act of meaningful communication, by which the audience (receptor of the message) gets the mediated meaning from the interpreter into the target language. The source language speech is something to which the audience only has acoustic access, its meaning is opaque for lack of knowledge of the language. The interpreter fulfils his/her task by translating or transferring the meaning into an understandable language for the audience. Usually, the people in the audience speak the target language fluently and understand it without any difficulty, even if this is not always their mother tongue. The interpreters task is very important and in many ways frustrating, because an interpreters view on the matter under discussion is not relevant, therefore it is not desirable at all. The interpreter is expected to be neutral, unbiased in rendering the message as adequately and exactly as possible, somewhat invisible; only if for technical reasons - sometimes interpretation does not work, will the audience become aware of the human factor involved in this act of communication. The audience as well as the oganisers or participants in the meeting usually ignore the interpreter and feel awkward because they have to resort to interpretation, that is to a third person, an intermediary in the communication act, which is a dialogue more often than not. However invisible an interpreter may be, the whole message can be rendered correctly and smoothly only if the interpreters capacity to communicate well is flawless. This capacity encompasses several qualities: first, knowledge of the situation, both cultural and political, social, economic etc. It is interesting to note that a new trend in interpretation studies has been outlined, regarding the status of cultural interpreter or cultural mediator. The term was launched in early eighties7 and it has become almost a buzz word in language studies. The cultural interpreter is a community or public service interpreter, working mainly to ensure that the client receives full and equal access to public services (Roberts 2002). The term cultural interpreter was used by Katan in his book (2004: 16) - to denote a large category of culturebound translators and interpreters. The role of a cultural interpreter is the same as that of a cultural mediator, who facilitates communication, understanding and action between persons or groups who differ with respect to
The term cultural mediator was first introduced by Stephen Bochner (1981) in his books The Mediating Person and Cultural Identity.
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language and culture. The interpreter will have to interpret the expressions, perceptions, intentions and expectations of each speaker belonging to a cultural group to the other cultural group (the audience). In order for the interpreter to be able to do this, (s)he must play the mediators role and be to a certain extent bicultural. As mentioned before, the interpreters status has changed dramatically in the last 10-12 years. Interpreting is now perceived as a community service job rather than a high rank career, where diplomacy and high officials are no longer the common ground. In fact, we can divide interpreting into community service interpretation (liaising interpreter) and conference interpreting, which requires well-acquired skills and abilities and a certain professional profile. In the past (50s, 60s even 70s), the interpreters role was thought of as a discreet, subtle and reliable blackbox and as a walking generalist translator of words (cf. Katan, 2004:18). At present the general intention is to minimize the interpreters job, turn it into something rather mechanic and disposable, especially if conferences approach a highly specialised field. For instance, the medical conferences (in gynecology, pediatrics, orthopedics, cardiology etc.) no longer resort to simultaneous interpretation because participants prefer to use English as a language of communication instead of their own language in their talks focused on professional topics. This trend of commonizing interpretation is the result of the growing need for oral, even cultural mediation in most circumstances: cross-border offices (police, immigration, customs offices), law courts, criminal investigations, city council offices of PR, other informal cases, such as TV talk shows, open-air shows, music and cinema festivals, business negotiations, telephone interpreting, etc. The more frequent and common the service of interpreting becomes, the more cultural the interpreters profile. The interpreter acquires a mediating function, in an attempt to facilitate understanding among the community members both of a linguistic (cross-language) and cultural (cross-culture) nature. Of course in the European communities there must arise a certain awareness of this new development and interpreters internal transformation. That is why universities can contribute to awareness raising by offering new curricula and syllabuses in this respect. * The aim of this course is to investigate the main cognitive and linguistic processes that lead to interpretation, consecutive and simultaneous in the act of verbal mediation. Psycho-cognitive studies in interpreting were conducted quite intensely for even more than two decades (70s 90s, even in the late 90s) and they all focused on the importance of the outcome, the tremendously stressful mind-racking process of transferring meaning interlingually while listening and speaking a the same time in simultaneous or noting down while listening and then rendering the message in the consecutive mode. For instance, the research school of Trieste (Gran 1990b, Fabbro, 1987, Daro&Fabbro 1994, Moser-Mercer, Lambert 1994, Gile 1995 et al.) made several experimental studies in order to demonstrate the mental and psycholinguistic processes that occur during interpretation and to prove that interpreting is an intellectual effort which requires great concentration and a relaxed and (re)productive mind at the same time. Inferential and deductive operations must be at work during interpretation as if the interpreter were supposed to produce a speech out of their own mind, although, in terms of meaning and intention - the target speech is only a copy of the original/source language one. Given the fact that interpreting also means mental work with two different linguistic codes, a crosslinguistic analysis of the whole process of transcoding is necessary for better capturing the difficulties and possible pitfalls that an interpreter must cope with during the act of interpretation. Listening to one source language message in order to further render it into a target language requires both comprehension and prompt wording or reverbalization of the original message. Elegance, intelligent and sometimes smooth or diplomatic interpretation is a constantly defining desideratum from an interpreter. Chapter four deals with the main crosslinguistic issues related to interpretation from English into Romanian, bearing in mind the fact that these two languages are quite distant linguistically, historically and culturally, therefore, interpretation into Romanian is not always an easy job, especially if the source speech is deeply anchored in the British culture, politics or sociolect 8. More often than not, current grammar and
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Sociolect is a term used in translation studies to define the varieties of English in terms of social strata (cf. Hatim &Mason).

lexical/conceptual (idiomatic) issues typical of Romanian must be well controlled in interpretation (consecutive or simultaneous) as well. For instance, if resultative phrases occur in an English speech, a reformulation of the events must be provided quickly and adequately, otherwise, the Romanian equivalent rendition would result in an awkward and inappropriate expression (e.g. cry oneself into a stupor, shout oneself hoarse, bang the door open, etc.). 2. Interpretation Studies and empirical research Since then interpretation has been developed continually and up until now when it has acquired a variety of forms: apart from the classical CI and SI that may occur in a conference setting, other types of services have emerged, according to the market needs, such as: teleconferencing or video-conferencing, telephone interpreting (USA experience), combination of chuchotage and CI or chuchotage and SI, court and community interpreting, etc. The working conditions have also changed, the interpreter became even more visible, the booths are placed in a visible, accessible but acoustically protected corner of the conference room, the IT equipment is currently provided for interpreters as well, so that they should access the computer screen and watch the slides closely from the booth, if necessary. Interpretation has thus become a subject in its own right, it has also benefited by a variety of connected scientific studies, such as: neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics or sociolinguistics, social psychology, psychometric studies, etc. Some specialists see it as a funny, intriguing profession, others consider it crazy, others - more and more useless. What is certain is that interpretation is a facilitating communication tool and it should remain so as long as it is still required and provided for. The fact that interpreters and scholars have also looked into its deep nature, trying to better understand its processes can only be encouraging for scientific research and further studies of the human mind. In universities, within the humanities, interpretation holds its own place as a fullfledged discipline. In this sense, J. Delisle and J. Woodsworth note: As in the case of translation the formalization of interpreter training has led to the emergence of a field of studies in its own right: the formulation of a set of theoretical principles on the basis of which the discipline can be taught, observed and described. Interpreters, like translators of the written word, have begun to reflect on the pioneers of their profession9. Practically, interpretation research history can be divided into several periods: the fifties, when the first steps were made in discussing interpretation from the interpreters perspective, on the basis of personal experience (Herbert, 1952, Rozan, 1956, Ilg, 1980, 1988b). These writings were devoid of a real scientific validity but they tried to identify most of the fundamental issues that are still discussed at present. The second period is marked by a deeper insight into the psychological aspects of interpretation, and a small number of experimental studies were made (Gerver, Barik, 1976). Gerver, the most active of these researchers, conducted experiments on interpretation over 10 years and initiated the organization of an international conference focused on interpretation which gathered interpreters and scientists from various disciplines for the purpose of starting off cooperation in his research. During the sixties and the seventies, a number of hypotheses were formulated regarding interpretation process and the influence and reactions to various factors such as source language, noise, speed of speech delivery, dcalage, working memory, etc., but no definite results came out of this research. However, towards the end of the seventies, more interpreters were attracted to interpreting research, but research was constantly limited to empirical studies. PH.D. theses and the growing AIIC bibliography in the domain contributed to enriching this field and to bringing about a new insight in interpreting techniques and strategies. The ESIT School of Paris crystallized into a dogma and gained weight in the community of practitioners and researchers alike. The major principle underlying this theory was that interpretation is based on the meaning, message or sense in the SL speech, not on words or linguistic structures solely. What the interpreter does while performing this act is not to transcode SL words into TL words, but to extract the message of the SL speech as an ordinary listener would, and then reformulate it into the TL without referring to the SL as such. Speech comprehension and speech production were considered to evolve almost automatically if working languages are mastered fully and flawlessly. Interpretation was perceived as a complex process, made up of several phases (intent listening, comprehension, production as an act of recreation of the message). Several models of interpreting were developed, including information-processing oriented ones (Moser 1978, Gerver 1976) and processing-capacity
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Quoted in Interpretazione simultanea e consecutiva, 1999: 22).

oriented of effort models by Gile (1990), or the more recent approach to the hermeneutic package of the comprehension and production poles in SI (Viaggio, 1999, 2000). In 1986, the Scuola Superiore per Interpreti e Traduttore of the Universita degli Studi di Trieste convened a large conference on the theoretical and practical aspects of teaching interpretation. During this conference, a number of ideas were publicly debated upon and cooperation of researchers from other disciplines was thus made possible. L. Gran and F. Fabbro (1987, 1989, 1990) and V. Dar (1994, 1995) for instance, substantially contributed to enlarging the domain of research by publishing several articles on neurolinguistics and its impact on interpretation research. An ample project based on neuro-psychological research started off at the time and it has continued up until the present days. Researchers from cognitive sciences are currently sharing their results with academia involved in collecting the latest data on interpretation as regards certain coping strategies or ways to improve and assess ones own production in interpretation. Further joint projects could be undertaken with researchers from various disciplines, if we admit the fact that interpretation should be viewed from an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspective. 2.1. The applied nature of Interpretation studies The art and act of interpreting is subject to a variety of scientific instruments: neurophysiological, psychometric, (socio-)linguistic, etc., a fact which makes experimental and empirical research so much the more realistic and relevant in terms of the concrete results that are reached with this research. Finally, integrative or holistic studies are meant to shed new light on conference interpreting. Interactions of all kinds - cultural, crosscultural, social - widen the horizon of the studies in a comprehensive and positive way. Thus a discipline-related variability opens new perspectives for introspection in any of the interpreting modes that will briefly be discussed below. 2.2. Varieties of interpreting, according to type of service required (market-oriented profession): CI proper, court interpreting, video(tele)conferencing, whispering, telephone interpreting (US experience). Italian book.. a. Court interpreting has evolved as a mode of interpretation in its own right since the beginnings of SI, after the second world war. Nowadays the European Court of Justice in Strasbourg as well as the International Court of Justice of the Hague use their own interpretation system and teams of professional interpreters who work on a contract basis. The main problem with court interpreting is the specialized legal terminology that court interpreters should be able to master so as to understand the full content of the source language message. The court interpreter has to mediate communication between the court and the defendant or a witness who does not speak the language of the court. This communication can be characterized as an interlingual, intercultural and intersocial communication. It is intersocial as the defendant often belongs to a social class that differs substantially from that of the interlocutors. Experienced translators and interpreters (D. Snelling et al.) consider that from the linguistic point of view, in court interpreting we partly have to do with planned discourse and partly with unplanned discourse. The planned side of discourse is generally related to legal language or institutional language (Jansen, 1995, apud D. Snelling, 1997:199). As far as the pragmatic perspective of court interpretation is concerned, the extra-linguistic aspects play an important role as well, as the interpreter has to develop his/her own strategies of coping with a variety of accents, styles and registers, to alternate between dialogue interpreting, sight translation, consecutive interpretation or chuchotage (to be discussed below). b. Community Interpreting (or interpreting for public services) is a mode of communicating in less formal situations, where the interpreter is called upon to do a kind of liaising, i.e. to convey the message to the interested party down from the concerned party into the target language and as fast and as effectively as possible. For instance, Police investigations, cross-examinations, investigative research, hospital circumstances, where a diagnosis must be posed on the basis of the patients answers to the doctors questions, are as many situations where an interpreter may be needed if the investigated person or the patient does not speak the language of the interviewer. c. Remote interpretation. As a result of the technicality side of SI, in recent years the multimedia technology has tentatively been applied to interpretation so as to facilitate and speed up transmission of the message even if

at a distance (remote interpreting10). The so-called videoconferencing technique was used on a par with the development of digital telephone connections for videoconferencing and the increased bandwidth through the use of optical fiber connections. Videoconferencing is a special case of teleconferencing involving a video (or video-projector) stream. It is an example of multimedia application, involving at least two different media, sound and image, in digital form. Multilingual videoconferencing is room videoconferencing in more than one language with interpretation. Interpretation is remote, i.e. interpreters do not need to be (and in fact are not) in the same locus where the conference is being held. For instance, the first experiment in remote interpretation, according to a professional interpreter, was made when a conference was held in Tokyo (1999) and interpreters were sitting in their interpreting rooms in Vienna, taking over from English into German, Italian and French. The basic problem encountered at the time was sound lagging, as compared to the speed of image transmission. d. Hidden videointerpreting for advertising tests (marketing studies) or political election campaigns has emerged recently on account of the observers need to understand and/or control the talks that are normally being held among the participants in a marketing session/political debate. The technical conditions provided for this kind of service are similar to videoconferencing, only the speakers are usually placed in an adjoined room, not too far away. Remote interpretation of this kind is possible when it is couples with a TV screen when the speaker is addressing a TV camera. The observers and the interpreter are placed in the adjoined studio; usually the observers are potential investors acting on foreign markets or they can be hired experts in monitoring political campaigns. Again, given the non-professional conditions of interpreting (no booth, poor soundtracking, overlapping voices, etc.), the interpreter must fight quite hard to adapt himself/herself to the audibility or listenability conditions of this somewhat unorthodox interpreting setting. e. Broadcast interpreting or media interpreting has also become prominent in recent years. Such interpretation has to comply with a set of requirements imposed by the broadcasting conditions, such as: - translations must be aurally intelligible and fluent; - translations must observe the broadcasting guidelines on speech; the translation should not be longer than the original broadcast or at least without lagging too far behind the original11; - synchronize each of the speech segments in the source language and their translation (not a lipsynch as in dubbing but a loose correspondence); - have a voice quality, intonation, and pronunciation close or nearly equivalent to the broadcast standard. From among all these requirements, aural intelligibility or listenability of the utterance of interpreters is considered to be of utmost importance. f. Film interpreting The interpreter of films, especially of silent and fiction movies is called upon to translate a type of language with a high symbolic and emotional content. The question that arises is how an interpreter is to relate to a film, i.e. a work of art, without jeopardising the delicate balance among its various components: music, image, acting, poetry, silence... these are open questions introducing a debate about film interpreting today (cf. D. Snelling, 1997:188). Obviously, the most convenient solution is to subtitle the script, but this would mean an adapted, possibly shortened kind of translation of the original film script. g. Telephone interpreting is a relatively new technique of SI which is quite frequently used in the USA, in longdistance calls, when Spanish and English are involved or when a French-speaking person from Canada would have to have a talk with an American person and neither of them knows the interlocutors language. An interpreter is then connected to the wire to play the role of the go-between in the telephone conversation. As to chuchotage, sight translation and shadowing, these are different modes of interpretation which are used in the interpretation training programmes so as to make students familiar with the variety of interpretation. h. Chuchotage (whispering) mode is interpretation half way consecutive, half simultaneous, without technical equipment. In practical terms, what happens is that the interpreter whispers into the listenere ear a translation of the speakers message addressed either to the listener only or to some other audience present in the room who understand the source language. Chuchotage can be continuous or discontinuous, according to the clients wish or needs. Chuchotage is somewhat different from consecutive interpretation in that there is no physical time
Remote interpretation is SI where the interpreter is not in the same room as the speaker or his/her audience, or both. Quite often, in recent years, at talk shows broadcast on the Romanian television (irrespective of the channel), during an interview, the interviewee (some foreign, English speaking personality) would have to wait in the TV viewers eyes until he got the message translated into his headphones, whenever the (Romanian) interviewer addressed some question or comment to him.
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provided for processing and note-taking procedures, the interpreter is forced to make a kind of summary of the delivered speech at the same time with the original speaker and deliver it to the listener in the target language so as to enable the latter almost instantaneous understanding of the source language message. Sometimes, a kind of guided dcalage is permitted, when the interpreter takes rapid notes (maybe shorthand or use of any other system) and delivers the speech a few seconds afterwards, in an abridged format. This technique requires the existence of a different relationship between the interpreter and the listener, for instance, the listener (beneficiary of the service of interpretation) knows the interpreter very well, the interpreter may also have a secretarial or executive job and knows what the beneficiarys professional special interest in the delivered speech is, etc, therefore, the interpreter will select those items, notions or ideas from the original speech which he considers to be more important for the listener to know rather than deliver everything from what the speaker is saying. i. Sight translation as an intermediary mode of communication. Sight translation is a very efficient exercise when used in interpreting training courses, because it develops the students ability to read more than the exact phrases or words that come to his/her eyesight. While silently reading a text into the source language, the interpreter must produce aloud the same text into the target language, as if that text were printed out on paper. At first glance this exercise does not seem too difficult, but a novice could discover that while interpreting into the mother tongue, many words or phrases would simply not come out properly. Sight translation is an effective exercise for testing the interpreters skill of promptly finding the most adequate equivalent words and phrases while skimming the source language text. according to D. Gile (1995), in sight translation, the translator or interpreter translates an SL text aloud while reading it, and the listening and analysis effort becomes a reading and analysis effort. The speech production remains, but there is no memory effort as in SI or CI. During production capacity, the translator must coordinate his/her individual capacity of processing the message into the TL as appropriately or felicitously as possible and to imprint his own rhythm of production while reformulating the target text. Concluding at this point, interpreting by way of the varieties it has evolved lately became a multiple service which nowadays is client-oriented rather than event-oriented as it used to be in its prime. That is the reason why interpreting as a client-oriented service, despite the wide intellectual and pragmatic possibilities that were developed in the interpreters personal and professional skills, has also deteriorated the interpreter-client interaction to some extent. On the other hand, conference interpretation proper has become more professional, more refined and demanding, being a highly qualified profession. Interpretation studies have also acquired a new dimension, focusing on the interpreters personal development and on quality interpretation. Conference interpretation (simultaneous interpretation) is the most advanced form of interpretation by which a message is simultaneously delivered into the target language by an interpreter while the original speech is being held in the source language, therefore, both the speaker and the interpreter are speaking at the same time, in two different languages. In conference settings, where the audience is formed of multilingual communities, the original speech in language A can be rendered simultaneously in other languages, B, C, D, E, or even more (as in the EU settings, where there are 21 working languages 12). According to one of the theoreticians of SI as a process, professor Richard Setton (University of Geneva), a conference interpretation situation can briefly be described as follows: interpreters in a sound-proof booth with headsets, control consoles and microphones and a direct view on the meeting room, deliver versions of the discourse in different languages on line with a lag of a few seconds, alternating every 20-30 minutes or as speakers take turns on the conference floor (Setton, 1999). SI has been practised in this form for more than fifty years (more precisely since the Process of Nuremberg, 1945-1946) and has become the standard medium of multilingual communication in international organisations and events, whether intergovernmental or private and highly specialised. Interpreting has in fact become a profession in its own right and is fully acknowledged by the international institutions which make wide use of this kind of communication services. This fact also led to the diversification of the profession in many respects, starting from modes of interpreting and ending up with the
In the European Union institutions meetings, there may occur events where as many as 8 or 9 working languages are provided in SI, this calling for 8 to 9 different booths and all the adjoined technical system of SI. Technically, even more languages can be provided, but the whole system is becoming more and more sophisticated and cumbersome to a certain extent. The European Parliament routinely uses 11 to 17 languages lately, in a single meeting (since May, 2005).
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channels or multimedia facilitators which constitute part and parcel of the act of interpretation nowadays. For instance, in the situation of telephone (remote) interpreting or in teleconferences where SI is also provided, high tech multimedia instruments are needed so that interpreters should provide an immediate message in the target language for the target listeners. 2.3. Interpretation as a social service As interpretation is a facilitating or intermediary tool for human communication and understanding, the interpreters role in this act is somewhat intriguing but indispensable; it is intriguing because the interlocutors involved in the act of communication cannot do without an interpreters help even if their bilateral interests do not regard the interpreter in any way; on the other hand, the interpreter himself has nothing to do with the interlocutors interests and concern. His/Her own concern is to make these interlocutors understand each other, so the conveyor-belt metaphor in relation to the interpreters status in the act of communication, no matter how dehumanising or diminishing it may be, is real and tremendously useful and telling. This is what an interpreter ultimately does, they convey the message and help people who speak different languages understand each other. Therefore, Interpretation has been one of the oldest professions in the world, since different languages are and have always been spoken by different people and peoples. In modern times, the client is the beneficiary of the service of interpretation and the interpreter is the provider of the service, but not always is the client the paying agent, so, a third party may intervene in the trading relationship of payment for a service, in our case an interpretation service. As for the ethical conditions and the code of good practice in exerting the profession of interpretation, the last chapter of the present course will be offering more details. * Shadowing as a preparatory technique of SI-in process Shadowing means the repetition into the source language of sentences, phrases, speech segments that the interpreter hears during the act of interpretation. It is a kind of parroting, but what makes it different and somewhat efficient is the meaningful exercise of perceiving the sense of the aural segments and of following it unerringly until the end of the speech. an efficient teaching technique for helping novices train their acoustic skills and pronunciation/accents in their working language, whether B or A. (the German/Germersheim/Mainz University experience, for trained students whose A language is Romanian but who have been living in a German-speaking community. Their German (B) language had enforced, but their A mother tongue had deteriorated sensibly, therefore, they spoke Romanian with a regional (Transylvanian) accent strongly contaminated by German-rooted calques. Any solution? .Hardly. Interestingly enough, one student who was bilingual, had no accent in speaking Romanian and his rendition was both fluent and clear. * 2.4. Comprehension as a preliminary cultural phase of interpretation The present study also starts from the proven assumption that alongside with translation but still differently from it in many respects - interpretation is an intercultural interlingual act of mediation. Ultimately, interpretation provides communication between a speaker and two or several linguistic communities. The interpreter as mediator is a characteristic that is inextricably linked with the ability to understand, to capture everything that goes with the message: speakers intended meaning(s) expressed in the message, underlying or contextual information, cultural differences and equivalents, social and psychological know how, to say nothing of the geo-political and historical background of the respective event where interpreting is the interphase between present and similar past events.