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MAGDALENA BARTŁOMIEJCZYK
Historical Perspective
Gile (1998), whose classification has gained a wide acceptance, enumerates four periods
of research into interpreting. The first three of them are, in fact, limited to conference
interpreting.
The “early writings period” covers literature from the 1950s and early 1960s. Its authors,
such as Jean Herbert, Jean-François Rozan, and Gérard Ilg, mostly did not purport to
write scientific texts, but rather to educate aspiring and beginning interpreters and maybe
also inform the general public about the job of the conference interpreter and raise the
consciousness of delegates making use of interpretation in meetings they attended. The
handbook by Herbert (1956) may serve as a highly representative example. The very sub-
title, How to Become a Conference Interpreter, expresses the purpose and spirit of the book.
Statements were usually made on the basis of authors’ own experience as conference
interpreters and/or interpreting teachers, but the methods and reasoning processes lead-
ing to these statements were not explained.
The “experimental period” (the 1960s and early 1970s) was characterized by much
research done by psychologists and psycholinguists (e.g., David Gerver, Frieda Goldman-
Eisler, Henri Barik), exploring aspects such as ear–voice span, pauses in delivery, the effect
of noise on the interpreter’s performance. Practicing interpreters had a negative attitude
to such studies, considering the experimental conditions too far from real interpreting
experience.
The “practitioner’s period,” lasting from the late 1960s until early 1980s, saw the involve-
ment of numerous interpreters and interpreting teachers into the discipline. Their studies
were mostly not empirical, but speculative and theoretical, based on intuitions or on facts
collected through nonsystematic observation. Prominent examples of works from this
period include the publications of the Paris School, the most important representative of
whom is Danica Seleskovitch. Her very influential book on conference interpreting (1978,
first published 1968) discusses the controversial concepts making up her “théorie du sens,”
such as deverbalization, a stage in the interpreting process between the reception of the
source text and the production of the target text when absolutely no trace of the linguistic
form of the source text is present in the interpreter’s mind. Another widely contested view
Empirical Research
The process of introducing empirical methods into interpreting research was mostly initi-
ated by scholars previously active in other disciplines, who brought with them their own
methodological tools. Empirical research can be divided into two main types: experimental
research and observational research.
The main advantage of experimental research is that it enables relatively high compar-
ability of obtained data; for example, the same source text can be interpreted in the same
booth by dozens of interpreters working under very similar conditions (although some
factors, such as the participants’ motivation or present physical and mental condition, are
beyond the experimenter’s control). The most important disadvantage of experimentation,
however, lies in the fact that experiments take part in an artificial environment, which may
lead to a situation that is not typical at all of the normal work environment. Consequently,
it is important to stress the need to design experiments properly, that is, so as to make the
materials and conditions as close to field reality as possible. It is unacceptable, for example,
to use source texts of a type that is actually never interpreted. Many interpreters report
that an unrealistic situation in an experiment makes for processes which depart consider-
ably from those that occur during actual interpreting. Some practicing interpreters go so
far as to reject all research based on experiments as devoid of ecological validity.
Another crucial problem of experimental research is the availability of participants.
Professional interpreters rarely agree to take part in experiments, especially if they are
offered no remuneration for the time and effort they would have to devote. As a result,
numerous studies are based on data obtained from just a few participants, which makes
any generalizations concerning the results difficult to justify. On the other hand, many
experimenters base their studies on data provided by students of interpreting, who are
much easier to recruit than professionals, especially for interpreter trainers. Such studies
usually do not suffer from scarcity of participants, but the main doubt they raise is to what
extent they actually reflect interpreting as performed on the market. It is not problematic
as long as the researcher admits that the results obtained in such a study apply to inter-
preting trainees at a certain stage of interpreter education (corresponding to that of the
participants); however, sometimes the results are presented as referring to professional
interpreting as well. Bilinguals who are neither professional interpreters nor interpreter
trainees are also sometimes asked to participate in experiments connected with interpreting.
This makes sense in studies on modes of interpreting that are sometimes actually performed
theory of interpreting 3
Interdisciplinarity
A large portion, and probably even the majority, of interpreting research is closely linked,
in one way or another, to other scientific disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, lin-
guistics, or neurophysiology. Toury attributes this interdisciplinarity (or “multidisciplinarity,”
as some prefer to call it) primarily to the involvement of scholars whose original field of
scientific interest was not translation studies, but who saw translation and interpreting as
“new, intriguing areas of application for tools they already had at their disposal; areas
which would be close enough to their ‘mother’ disciplines as well as sufficiently unexplored
to warrant research with the help of these tools” (Toury, 1991, p. 45). Some of these scholars
made a foray into interpreting research with one or two studies, and some have continued
to regularly provide very valuable input over many years. A prominent example of the
latter is Ingrid Kurz (formerly Pinter) from the University of Vienna, who started out in
psychology, and was one of the first scholars to write a PhD on interpreting (in 1969).
Appreciating the crucial role other scientific disciplines play for translation studies,
Malmkjær (2000) also notes some potential problems resulting from this phenomenon.
theory of interpreting 5
First of all, the level of knowledge may be insufficient, which applies equally to a trans-
lation scholar’s knowledge of another discipline and to knowledge of translation studies
acquired by a scholar from another discipline. Second, wholesale borrowing of a complete
theory rather than just a research tool may lead to explaining translation in the service of
the discipline from which the theory has been adapted rather than in the service of trans-
lation studies. Third, there is a danger that another discipline comes into the foreground
to such an extent that translation is lost from sight. And, last but not least, the question
of prestige can be considered, and a discipline providing insight for other disciplines will
normally be seen as stronger than a discipline drawing from other disciplines. This section
will discuss some examples of studies combining interpreting research with elements
imported from other fields (for which Malmkjær’s term “feeder disciplines” is used).
Psychology was the point of departure for the studies of conference interpreting in the
“experimental period.” This is not surprising, as most authors of these studies were trained
psychologists. This wave of research is not without some serious shortcomings, but it
launched empirical research into interpreting and probably represents the only period in
its history when so many noninterpreters took an interest in interpreting. What attracted
psychologists the most were the “mysterious” mental processes underlying listening and
speaking at the same time in simultaneous interpreting. However, many of them failed to
understand the strategic dimension of interpreting, for example the fact that an interpreter
may choose to omit some portions of source text as redundant or having minor importance,
or add something by way of explaining some culture-bound concepts.
Oléron and Nanpon’s study (2002) was based on both observational and experimental
data, although the second type was clearly given priority. The authors applied a quantita-
tive analysis to their experimental material to determine, among other things, the delivery
rate (number of words per minute) of speakers and interpreters. The most important part of
their findings, however, concerns ear–voice span. Although the average ear–voice span lay
somewhere between two and three seconds, it was discovered that its distribution was very
asymmetrical, ranging from 0.5 to 11.1 seconds, and probably depended on many variables
such as the speed of delivery or length and frequency of pauses in the original speech.
Valuable as this study is, due to the fact that it raised interest in interpreting as a research
object and posed numerous important questions, it must be noted that it suffers from many
methodological weaknesses, some of them typical of interpreting research done by non-
interpreters. First of all, the number of participants was very small—only three professional
interpreters. Second, the interpreting situation was unrealistic. In some parts of the
experiments, the participants were requested to interpret strings of disconnected words
and sentences, which never happens in practice. In the part in which they did interpret
coherent texts, the texts were not of the type that would appear in conferences: fragments
of Saint-Exupéry’s book The Little Prince and the UNESCO Courier, chosen because they
existed in a number of different language versions and thus enabled interpreting in several
different language combinations.
Another popular feeder discipline for interpreting research is neurophysiology. For
example, Fabbro, Gran, Basso, and Bava (1990) describe an experiment where simultaneous
interpreting was studied by means of an experimental procedure known as verbal–manual
interference paradigm. Fourteen advanced interpreting students with Italian as first language
and English as second language were asked to interpret, while tapping a key connected
to a counter, proverbs (which involves the meaning-based approach) and lists of words
(which involves the form-based approach) in English and in Italian. The resulting interfer-
ence did not show any pronounced difference between right and left hand, which suggests
that simultaneous interpreting requires the involvement of both hemispheres. There was,
however, a very considerable difference between interpreting with the meaning-based
approach and with the form-based approach, the percentage of disruption for both hands
6 theory of interpreting
being much higher for the former condition. This suggests that meaning-based interpreting
is a more demanding cognitive task.
The third crucial feeder discipline for interpreting studies is linguistics, or rather various
branches of it. Cohesion studies, for example, have been of great interest to scholars engaged
in research on interpreting. Shlesinger (1995) set out to validate empirically the hypothesis
that a simultaneously interpreted text differs in the types and density of cohesive ties from
the source text. In the experiment she conducted, 13 advanced interpreting students were
asked to interpret from English into Hebrew an authentic impromptu speech in English.
They did it twice in succession in a standard laboratory used for teaching simultaneous
interpreting. The purpose of the second interpretation was to establish whether participants
would make any nonrandom changes in the cohesive links due to the prior knowledge of
the source text. Their interpretations were recorded and transcribed. The source text made
extensive use of cohesion and contained cohesive links of four types: lexical cohesion,
reference, substitution, and conjunction. The results of the experiment confirmed the initial
hypothesis by revealing extensive shifts in each type of examined cohesive devices,
particularly those which were seen as not indispensable to comprehend the informational
content and those whose understanding required prior knowledge that the subjects did
not have.
Another branch of linguistics particularly relevant for interpreting research is pragmatics.
In Setton’s highly technical book meant as “a bridge between interpretation studies and
mainstream linguistics” (1999, p. xiv), Setton relied to a great extent on the findings of
pragmatics, describing the effect of context rather than just source text on the target text.
On the basis of a corpus of German–English and Chinese–English interpretations (obtained
partly under real conference conditions and partly experimentally), he showed how the
extralinguistic information available to the interpreters helped disambiguate and sometimes
enrich the informational content present in the source message. World knowledge and
situational knowledge both had a role to play in this aspect.
The 1990s and the 2000s saw the emergence of sociology and sociolinguistics as crucial
feeder disciplines for interpreting research. Wadensjö (1998), for example, explored com-
munity interpreting as a special case of interaction, significantly different from conversa-
tions between two individuals. On the basis of observational data collected in authentic
medical and legal settings involving interpreting between Swedish and Russian, she looked
at interpreters as social actors and interpreting as “a matter of both linguistic and social
competence” (1998, p. 14). She was among the first to challenge the prescribed nonpar-
ticipatory role of interpreters, which has since become the focus of a number of socially
oriented studies dealing with the roles played by interpreters working in a wide range of
settings such as police stations, courts, hospitals, and universities (e.g. Metzger, 1999; Roy,
2000; Angelelli, 2004a, 2004b).
Other fairly popular feeder disciplines include history (e.g., Bowen, Bowen, Kaufmann,
& Kurz, 1995, discussing the role of interpreters in various historic events on the basis of
information obtained from primary and secondary sources), and physiology (e.g., Klonowicz,
1994, investigating the management of energy resources in simultaneous interpreting by
measuring blood pressure and heart rate of interpreters, as cardiovascular activity reflects
effort and stress).
Conclusion
Interpreting research nowadays has many facets. It moves away from prescriptivism. It
seeks to describe all interpreting modes and settings and all aspects of interpreting, includ-
ing long-standing issues such as interpreter education or directionality (interpreting from
theory of interpreting 7
or into one’s native language), as well as new topics such as performance of interpreters
having no formal education in the profession. The proportion of empirical studies is on
the rise, as is the interest in modes other than conference interpreting, the traditional
domain of interpreting research. However, interpreting theory is divided, mainly into the
psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic approaches, which look at different aspects of inter-
preting (information processing vs. interpersonal relations during interpreted interactions),
and do not merge. Angelelli suggests the need for “an integrative theory of interpreting”
that “will include and account for the discourse features of an interaction and the social
context in which it is embedded, as well as the information processing aspect of the task”
(2004a, p. 89).
References
Angelelli, C. V. (2004a). Revisiting the interpreter’s role. A study of conference, court, and medical
interpreters in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.
Angelelli, C. V. (2004b). Medical interpreting and cross-cultural communication. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press.
Berk-Seligson, S. (1990). The bilingual courtroom. Court interpreters in the judicial process. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press.
Bowen, M., Bowen, D., Kaufmann, F., & Kurz, I. (1995). Interpreters and the making of history.
In J. Delisle & J. Woodsworth (Eds.), Translators through history (pp. 245–77). Amsterdam,
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Bühler, H. (1986). Linguistic (semantic) and extra-linguistic (pragmatic) criteria for the evaluation
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Fabbro, F., Gran, L., Basso, G., & Bava, A. (1990). Cerebral lateralization in simultaneous inter-
pretation. Brain and Language, 39, 69–89.
Gerver, D. (1969). The effects of source language presentation rate on the performance of simul-
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Rate-Controlled Recordings, University of Louisville.
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Klonowicz, T. (1994). Putting one’s heart into simultaneous interpretation. In C. Lambert &
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8 theory of interpreting
Suggested Readings
Gile, D. (2001). Interpreting research: What you never wanted to ask but may like to know.
Retrieved October 6, 2011 from http://www.aiic.net/ViewPage.cfm/article229.htm
Gile, D., Dam, H. V., Dubslaff, F., Martinsen, B., & Schjoldager, A. (Eds.) (2001). Getting started
in interpreting research: Methodological reflections, personal accounts and advice for beginners.
Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.
Pöchhacker, F. (2004). Introducing interpreting studies. London, England: Routledge.
Pöchhacker, F. (2009). The turns of interpreting studies. In G. Hansen, A. Chesterman, &
H. Gerzymisch-Arbogast (Eds.), Efforts and models in interpreting and translation research
(pp. 25–46). Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.
Pöchhacker, F., & Shlesinger, M. (Eds.) (2002). The interpreting studies reader. London, England:
Routledge.