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 rapidchanging 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 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-theart-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. speakeradaptive 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
1 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).

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 utterances 2. 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 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
2 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).

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 timeconsuming and most significant, history-making event 4. 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 wellknown 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
4 The hearings lasted until October the next year, 1946.
5 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.

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 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 self-training for
interpreters. So, the professional conference interpreter is a well-established, well-defined
and well-paid 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 eighties 7 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 culture-bound 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 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.
7 The term cultural mediator was first introduced by Stephen Bochner (1981) in his
books The Mediating Person and Cultural Identity.

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 sociolect8. More often than not, current grammar and
lexical/conceptual (idiomatic) issues typical of Romanian must be well controlled in
interpretation (consecutive or simultaneous) as well. For instance, if resultative phrases
8 Sociolect is a term used in translation studies to define the varieties of English in terms
of social strata (cf. Hatim &Mason).

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 full-fledged 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
9 Quoted in Interpretazione simultanea e consecutiva, 1999: 22).

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 processingcapacity 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).
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 interpreting 10). The socalled 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.
10 Remote interpretation is SI where the interpreter is not in the same room as the
speaker or his/her audience, or both.

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 long-distance 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.
11 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.

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 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
languages12). 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 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,
12 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).

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.