The Interpreters' Newsletter n. 07 - 1996

Reference to Goffman in the present article affords a starting point for a discussion of interpreting and interaction, prompting a number of considerations on the mental processes involved in interpreting- hence the inclusion in the title of the broader term "action". The discussion does not purport to be in any way conclusive. lndeed, the very beauty of taking Goffman as a potential vantage point from which to explore a fresh perspective on interpreting studies is that the relevance of the debate is not exhausted in the space of a sing1e article. The essays by Goffman to which reference is made on the following pages are pioneering works in the now flourishing field of sociolinguistics. Though at first sight unlikely, their interest for the interpreting scholar - as well as for the practising or trainee interpreter - is arguably immense. Be i t for the reader to judge whether he or she shares this enthusiasm and, if so, as a premiss for mere academic debate or a basis for further study and observation.

lt is by now an axiom that translation and interpretation are forms of mediated interlingual communication, whereby both analysis of the originai and production of the target te x t are govemed by hypertextual (in tbe skopostheorie sense of tbe term) and macrotextual analyses based upon tbe relevant features of tbe situation. A crucial component of sucb analyses is tbe structure of explicatures and implicatures and, more relevantly, the way that, within the limits of bis rhetorical competence, a writer/speaker chooses his explicitations as a function of wbat be assumes is a) not necessary to make explicit, b) not advisable to make explicit - and vice versa. The author is counting on bis addressees to put the two they read/hear and tbe two they know/assume/can infer together in order to apprehend his intended sense (see Viaggio 1996).

The present experimental study has been devoted mainly to the analysis of the cognitive mechanisms involved in the processing of numerals in the oral, phonologic modality of expression. This has been done by means of the special task of simultaneous interpretation from one language into another wherein, apart from an initial phase of comprehension and a final one of production of verbal material, there is, somewhere in between, the phase of translation of the numeral into a language other than that of presentation.

For the purpose of this paper, the key-concepts to be retained here are: discourse analysis and early stages of a training course. As is widely known, the area of discourse analysis is concerned with the study of how language functions in human interaction. Centrai to this investigation is the notion of text defined by De Beaugrande and Dressler as a "communicative occurrence" which can be made manifest in sound or print (De Beaugrande and Dressler, 1981).

Quality in interpreting is a frequently discussed yet little explored concept. As services are increasingly evaluated the way products are, with ISO 9000 and TQM having became the hallmarks of production in post-industrial societies, translation and interpreting cannot claim special status as "works of art", to be evaluated much the same way as gymnastics, dance or figure skating competitions. This is not to say that translating or interpreting lack artistic value or creativity, but current practice puts them squarely into the category of services; as such they become subject to performance evaluations similar to those carried out on products and other types of services. Especially interpreting, which in the eyes of the consumer carries a hefty price tag, is becoming the object of such evaluations. There is no point in lamenting the apparent loss of special status. As professional skills ha ve evolved since antiquity, and particularly since the Nuremberg trials - seen by most as a historical turning point with the introduction of simultaneous interpreting - the public is coming to expect more and more of interpreters, while at the same time judging their performance often too harshly. This is frequently done without bearing in mind the multitude of factors that can affect the quality of interpreting.

For some time now I bave been engaged in an animated epistolary polermic with Mariano Garcfa Landa on the need to go beyond the strictly 'translational' aspects of SI and delving, among other things, into its psycho-motor support, i.e. descending from the lofty beights of Translation Theory into tbe pedestrianly natural first object that supports the physical, mental and social sides of our craft. Mariano basically asserts the following: Translation (including SI) pertains to tbe second, social object - as opposed to the strictly natural first, and research into the psycho-motor first-objectual support is but research into the subsidiary trappings, but not the essence, of SI. I agree, except that until such time as the black box is pried open, research and experimentation are plausible only around SI's material support, since only a knowledge of the first object will begin to tell us, if no t wbat the second object is or ought to be, how it is possible, what it requires, bow it works, and what obstacles it has to surmount.

Despite the growing number of publications on a variety of facets of translation and interpreting studies, very little material exists on the personality of translators and interpreters. A seminar class led by Prof. Ingrid Kurz at the Institute of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Vienna, Austria, set itself the task of identifying the personality traits considered typical of translators and interpreters by practitioners and researchers in the field as well as by beginners and advanced students at the Vienna Institute. This paper deals with existing literature in the field as well as a survey conducted among two groups of students. Both the theoretical and empirica! parts of the paper are based on the communication value orientation model by Pierre Casse. Personality traits considered necessary for or typical of translators andlor interpreters by various authors were identified and related to Casse's value orientations. Subsequently, Casse's self-assessment exercise was administered to beginners and advanced students at the Vienna Institute.

This study focuses on the importance of the syntactic structure of an oral text in the cognitive processes underlying simultaneous interpretation. The experimental paradigm chosen for this study was devised by the American researcher Robert Jarvella at the beginning of the 70's. The experiments carried out by Jarvella centre on 'immediate recall' tasks, aiming at assessing the influence of formai structures on speech processing. The first finding of Jarvella's studies was listeners' tendency to segment the incoming information into chunks, corresponding to the syntactic segmentation into 'clauses' and 'sentences'.

In this study I hope to show that the dynarmic perspective in text linguistics, which has only begun its development in recent years alongside the more widely practised and firmly established synoptic perspective, has much to offer for a greater understanding of the mechanisms of simultaneous interpretation and for the promotion of these mechanisms in student interpreters.