The Interpreters' Newsletter n. 15 - 2010

Founded in 1988 as the first journal on Interpreting Studies, The Interpreters’ Newsletter publishes contributions covering theoretical and practical aspects of interpreting.

The profoundly deaf and hard-of-hearing live and work like their fellow citizens, but constantly have to adjust to sound deprivation in order to communicate in mainstream society. How do they cope with international communication? This paper focuses on one aspect of international communication: global news coverage through simultaneous Italian Sign Language (LIS) interpreting on television. A comparative linguistic analysis of a small multimodal corpus obtained from the transcriptions of video recorded television news bulletins in spoken Italian and a simultaneously interpreted version in LIS, has revealed insights into how and to what extent news related specifically to global conflicts crosses the international ‘sound barrier’ and has highlighted some of the problems encountered by professional sign language interpreters. This analysis of professional interpreting in a real life working environment (the television studio) has led to findings that can be turned to good use in sign language interpreter training classes.

The present study aims to examine perceptual differences in the identification of English words between Japanese professional interpreters educated in English in childhood in a foreign country (returnee interpreters) and Japanese professional interpreters educated in Japanese in childhood in Japan (non-returnee interpreters). We conducted an identification test of English words in sentences with returnee interpreters and non-returnee interpreters. In the test, the participants were asked to listen to recordings including English words and to identify the words. The results showed that the returnee interpreters identified the English words significantly better than the non-returnee interpreters. Also, we found some commonalities in phonetic perception (listening skills) between the returnee and non-returnee interpreters.

The article addresses the contentious issue of the spread of English as a lingua franca in a number of domains – a trend that is not viewed very favourably by many interpreting professionals. After reviewing the development of English as a lingua franca (ELF) and its unique position in different domains, the advantages and disadvantages of ELF are discussed on a general level before approaching the topic from the interpreters’ perspective. The negative stance taken by many interpreters towards ELF is viewed as a result of work-related as well as economic and psychosocial reasons. Against this backdrop the paper reports the first results of a study on the communicative effectiveness of English as a lingua franca vs. simultaneous interpreting. The findings indicate that under appropriate working conditions, in a given setting of technical communication, professional simultaneous interpreting can ensure a higher level of audience comprehension than the use of non-native English.

Ever since the profession became internationally organized in the early 1950s, quality has been a central topic in conference interpreting. In the mid-1980s, members of AIIC (International Association of Conference Interpreters) were first asked what importance they attributed to various quality criteria when sponsoring candidates for membership (Bühler 1986). Follow-up studies, however, were mostly conducted among users of interpretation services. With the exception of Chiaro and Nocella (2004), who conducted a web-based survey among conference interpreters, service providers have had no chance to express their views on the issue of quality. The two studies reported in this paper take the web-based approach pioneered by Chiaro and Nocella (2004) as a starting point for a survey among two well-defined populations, that is, members of AIIC and of the German Association of Conference Interpreters (VKD). This paper presents the findings for conference interpreters’ rating of the relative importance of output-related quality criteria for a simultaneous interpretation. Furthermore, the two associations’ members were also asked to link the importance of the various criteria to concrete assignment types. The main aim of this paper consists in comparing the two groups and finding out whether members of a national and international professional organization attach similar importance to quality criteria or whether they differ in their perceptions of quality.