Category Archives for Interpreting

Halliday, Systemic Functional Grammar and Descriptive Translation Studies

The total opposite of structural language theories (such as Saussure) are functional language theories. Here represented first and foremost by Michael Halliday. Halliday is the father of SFL, systemic functional linguistics, from which genre pedagogy (see for instance Pauline Gibbons) seeks its roots. SFL seeks to analyze language from both structure and words in order to establish three meta-functions namely ideational, interpersonal and the textual. I haven’t seen any interpreting research using SFL (absolutely not a guarantee that there isn’t any), but guts feeling says it should fit well. There are some translation research done with SFL as one analysis model though. Apparently the problem with SFL as tool (only as hearsay as I haven’t tested it) is that it is descriptive, but does not really lead you any further. A bit like DTS, Descriptive Translation Studies. DTS was founded by Gideon Toury and became a revolutionary change in direction in translation studies, which up until then was almost solely prescriptive.

 

I teach from a book by Jan Svennevig Språklig Samhandling and the post is only my interpretation of his book in particular and of systemic functional linguistics in general.

Consecutive Interpreting

A couple of years ago a friend invited me to her graduation ceremony at Sorbonne. They have very nice graduation ceremonies for their french courses “Cours de civilisation française.” I thought that it would be nice for my friend if I took consecutive notes and interpreted the speech for her afterwards. Not that she needed interpretation, but just to remember her gratuation. Since consecutive interpreting means taking notes for up to ten minutes and then interpret after the speaker has finished it seemed like a suitable exercise. So I started taking notes, and later transcribed the speech for her. It occured to me now that I could put it on the blog as an example of note taking. I discussed it in class with my students as well, as I held an introductory lecture on note taking. I believe it is important to show your own notes since note taking is so personal. There is no way you can say that your notes HAVE to look this or that way, but there are of course good advice to be given on how to make it as effectively as possible.

The speech was nice and not very difficult. It is the teacher’s farewell speech to her students, solemn, a bit of fun and held in French of course. She also uses the triadic structure several times which also facilitates interpreting, repetition and lists are good for this.
In John le Carré’s book, Mission song (very good image of interpreting by the way, if you overlook the fact that the hero speaks at least 25 languages and interpret to and from all of them), the boss calls the interpreters notes the Babylonian cuneiform. My notes are not exactly a Babylonian cuneiform. I have a pretty bad note taking technique, you should really use more symbols than I do. There are stories of legendary interpreters whose note taking technique was to draw caricatures of the speakers and those caricatures made them remember everything. But as you can see in the picture it’s not abut shorthand, neither to note everything down. Focus is put on logical connections and important, mening bearing concepts rather than words (although you can take down words of course). You create a support for your memory.

Konsek

Normally, you interpret directly after the speech. This time it now took me about ten minutes before I had time to write down the interpreting. The fact that I wrote it down, also gave me the chance to reflect once more on what was said, but here she said (with the reservation that English is not my mother tongue of course):

Today I have three things to say to you. First of all: Bravo! Bravo because the term is over and you stand here on graduation day. But above all, bravo to you who came to class every day (well, almost every day anyway …). Bravo since you were always were on time (well, almost always anyway …), bravo to you for always having done all the homework (well, almost all anyway …), and bravo for all the work you have done.
And you have succeeded! And what is even more important is the great decision you made six months ago. The decision to leave home and family and to travel to a foreign country. And now you stand here and now you have succeeded. Bravo!
I would also like to say thank you! Thank you for choosing France for you studies and thank you for choosing la Sorbonne. But it’s not the end here. When you go home, the real work begins to maintain the French language. Eventually, the French language may disappear from your memory, but you will always carry the adventure with you. And you will tell your friends about the adventure and your children and perhaps your students (if you are a teacher). And maybe, your friends, children and students will choose to come to the Sorbonne too, and then you have done the same job as we do. Then you spread the love of the French language and French culture. I expect you to do it and I say thank you for doing it.
Thirdly, I want to say goodbye, Au Revoir. You know that there are many words for the same concept in French and here comes a short vocabulary lesson. Au revoir means til we meet again. So see you again. Perhaps we see you already this spring if you have signed up for the spring semester, maybe we’ll meet later, maybe we’ll meet somewhere else. So I say Au Revoir and phonetically, you have learned that revoir (two claps) has two syllables and that e ‘decreases (I love this stuff). So now, all of you say after me Au Revoir. And I would say to you: Well done, Thank you and Au Revoir!

Communicative Conventions

Conventions in language is an unconcious or at least covert agreement between the speakers of a language of the links between words and morphemes and their meaningful contents. The links are mostly random (altough for instance onomatopeic words have a clear sound link to its meaning e.g. splash). This conventional connection between content and expression is called a sign. Linguistc signs can be combined into a system we call syntax.

However a communicative convention contains not only links between units in the linguistic system, it also contains links to the language users and to the communicative situation. The communicative convention is something we (all human language beings) master better or worse. But for interpreters it is vital, both that we master it but also that we can recognize it and explore it. Think about how, in principle, a language has means to create a common understanding among the speakers of that language. Yet, one language contains so many different registers, dialects, ideolects and sociolects so you can ask yourself whether there is a real possibility to create a common understanding between all speakers of the language. On a very general basis perhaps but when we move past general statements.

Interpreters master not only one language but it is their job to convey meaning from one language to the other (obviously…). In order to convey that meaning they need to be familiar with the communicative convention of both languages, but also of a multitude of different communicative conventions within the two languages. Knowing the convention is to know where it is valid, in which groups it is actively used and where it is perhaps not known at all.

I teach from a book by Jan Svennevig “Språklig Samhandling” and the post is only my interpretation of his book in particular and of communicative conventions in general.

Communication Theory

I’m trying to conquer Communication Theory for the second time round. Teaching a topic is always better than just studying it if you want to really conquer it. I find communication theory very relevant for interpreting which might be the reason for why it’s often taught to first year interpreting students. The only problem, just as for rhetoric is that when you are a first year interpreting student you don’t necessarily understand how useful it is. But here we are anyway.

The lecture is quite heavy, a lot of information to take in in a fairly short time, and mostly theory. And of course people get tired listening attentively for 45 minutes, more than you actually CAN do  if I remember my teacher training correctly. I don’t have much to remedy this, but this year I tried to lighten it up at little bit by putting in photos of all the theoreticians I refer to. I don’t know if it really changed anything, but at least I had a great time looking them up. Haven’t you always wanted to know what Ferdinand de Saussure looked like? I teach from a book by Jan Svennevig Språklig Samhandling and the post is only my interpretation of his book in particular and of communication theory in general.

Halliday, Systemic Functional Grammar and Descriptive Translation Studies

The total opposite of structural language theories (such as Saussure) are functional language theories. Here represented first and foremost by Michael Halliday. Halliday is the father of SFL, systemic functional linguistics, from which genre pedagogy (see for instance Pauline Gibbons) seeks its roots. SFL seeks to analyze language from both structure and words in order to establish three metafunctions namely ideational, interpersonal and the textual. I haven’t seen any interpreting research using SFL (absolutely not a guarantee that there isn’t any), but guts feeling says it should fit well. There are some translation research done with SFL as one analysis model though. Apparently the problem with SFL as tool (only as hearsay as I haven’t tested it) is that it is descriptive, but does not really lead you any further. A bit like DTS, Descriptive Translation Studies. DTS was founded by Guideon Toury and became a revolutionary change in direction in translation studes, which up until then was almost solely prescriptive.

I teach from a book by Jan Svennevig “Språklig Samhandling” and the post is only my interpretation of his book in particular and of systemic functional linguistics in general.

Communicative competence, generative grammar and Dan Everett

I would say that an interpreter has a very well developed communicative competence. The definition of communicative competence being that we create meaning in utterances in many different communication situations. Dell Hymes was the first one to coin communicative competence in 1966 with the meaning that a person knows how words and structures works in different communicative situations. Communicative competence was a sort of counter balance to Chomsky‘s theory of generative grammar. Chomsky is indeed interested in the competence of the language user, but only as a formal competence not how it is used in a communicative situation. The (in)famous theory of generative grammar defined as something all human beings are born with and without which we would not be able to produce language. The generative grammar would also be the reason for language universals. Features that are common to all or most of the world’s languages. The most interesting dispute of generative grammar, I believe, comes from Dan Everett in his book “Don’t sleep there are snakes”. In his book he gives an account of his life as a linguist and missionary (at first at least) in the Amazonian jungle. He lived with the Pirahã people and gradually learns their language and culture. He claims that there are no language universals to be found in the Pirahã language. Their language is quite simply totally different.

I teach from a book by Jan Svennevig “Språklig Samhandling” and the post is only my interpretation of his book in particular and of communicative competence in general.

Tips for speakers

One of my research colleagues Anna-Riita Vuorikoski says that the responsibility for understanding a message does not only lie with the interpreter. It is a mutual responsibility between the speaker and the interpreter. Hence we need to educate our speakers as well. The blog Translating and Interpreting has a very good post on Tips for working with interpreters. I cannot say it better myself.

Transcribing anyone?

Almost anything you would like to study about interpreting needs to be transcribed. Your are studying the spoken word and if you would like to classify, analyze, maybe do some statistical calculations you need a written copy. Not much difference if you study the interpreting, a retrospection or make interviews. But transcription takes time, 1 minute of interpreting takes at least 10 minutes to transcribe and the more detailed you want to be the longer it takes. Now, I know interpreting researchers are not the only one’s here, we share this problem with speech and interaction researchers for example. But still!!! I am dreaming of money to hire somebody to transcribe and of corpora of interpreted texts being put in great databases, accessible through internet. Maybe I should start with written surveys instead, much easier to sort and no transcribing involved, doesn’t feel as exciting though. I guess I’ll just continue. I bless my typing teacher in high school, my fate would have been even worse had I not been a fairly fast touch typist (I didn’t get 97 % from the Botswana secretarial college though :))

What kind of interpreter are you?

An old received idea on interpreters is that they are invisible transmitters of meaning or message. This is the kind of interpreter I was educated to be. You leave your feelings outside the booth or the meeting room, you just transmit the message. As I learned the profession, I have also come to question this statement more and more. Is it possible for any human being to be perfectly neutral in any situation?

By this I don’t not mean that I, in my role as an interpreter should go in and give personal comments on the message, but what I mean is that I do believe that just the way I am transmitting something affects my neutrality, my choice of tone, voice, tense. Where I chose to start or stop interpret, in a smaller setting, where I cut in to deliver my interpretation.

There is a Swedish researcher, Cecilia Wadensjö, who wrote a book called Interpreting as Interaction. She calls interpreting a pas de deux for three. Claudia Angelelli is an American researcher who wrote Revisiting the Interpreter’s Role. In the end of that book she has a letter from one of the respondents in the survey she made who says that interpreting is everything but to “just translate what he says”.

You could also ask yourself if your client wants a perfectly neutral interpreter. In some settings, my struggle to be neutral can be seen by my client as a strong hint that I am part of the establishment too, rather than the go-between.

I don’t have any answers to this of course but I find the issue more and more fascinating.

Interpreters’ responsibility

On May 12, 2008 Eric Camayd-Freixas interpreted at hearings of almost 400 illegal immigrants who were arrested in a raid at a meat plant in Potsville. After the hearings he decided to breach his professional secrecy and circulated a 14-page long account of the hearings in which he points out all the irregularities that were committed by the authorities. You can read more about this here. I have always admired so called whistle blowers. It is a very delicate and difficult task to stand up and point out irregularities if you are part of an organisation or system which the interpreter in this case definitely was. However, an interpreter’s professional secrecy is absolutely crucial to the profession. In an ideal world we would have debriefing sessions for interpreters. That would create a possibility for interpreters to share their experiences without breaking the professional secrecy and in extreme cases like the one of Mr. Camayd-Freixas he would not be left alone with the very important decision he had to take, i.e. denouncing authorities. Sometimes we end up in difficult situation due to agencies, I have for instance interpreted a pedophilia case eight-months-pregnant, sometimes missions that seemed totally straight forward end up in a very complicated situation, like when the defense lawyer decided to make the interpreter look like an ignorant in order to make the witness less credible (the defense lawyer actually apologized at the end of the day). We carry all sorts of similar experiences that we cannot share in order not to breach our professional secrecy.

In South Africa after apartheid a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established. The aim of the TRC was that everyone who had committed a crime during apartheid was free to witness in front of the TRC and ask for pardon. The witness was recorded and the person then granted pardon. People who were directly or indirectly victims were often present at the hearings and everything was interpreted simultaneously into the 13 official South African languages. This process was very fruitful for the restarting of South Africa, but the ones who suffered very much during this process were the interpreters. It became so difficult for them to bear all these dreadful stories that a special debriefing program had to be organized. “I am the filter that all pain is sifted through” said one of the interpreters in for the TRC. Their work has become a theatre performance that has been touring world wide. Should you come across it I strongly recommend that you see it.