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Interpreting Strategies in Real-life Interpreting–Corpus-based Description of Seven Professional Interpreters’ Performanceby Dr. Binhua WangSchool of Interpreting & Translation Studies, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China 510420 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Abstract Interpreting studies in the past decades have been focused on the exploration of the cognitive process in interpreting, esp. simultaneous interpreting. While the investigation of interpreting product is just as important in shedding light on the nature of interpreting, this aspect has remained comparatively under-explored. This article is a descriptive study of interpreting strategies based on the observation of seven professional interpreters’ performance in on-site interpreting. A Chinese-English Interpreting Corpus (CEIPPC) of over 100,000 words was built up with the transcripts of video recordings of their interpreting for the Chinese Premier’s Annual Press Conferences in 14 years (1998-2011). Through comparative analysis of the source text and the target text, as well as analysis of the interpreted text itself, interpreting strategies were found to be similar in the seven interpreters’ interpreting and consistent over the 14 years, which points to a trend towards standards of interpreting. This article reports on the major interpreting strategies employed by these interpreters and explains how and why they use them with examples from the corpus. Research based on the corpus analysis of on-site interpreting suggests great potential in describing not only the features of interpreted texts (or “interpretese” according to Shlesinger), interpreting strategies and standards of interpreting but also in revealing the nature of interpreting behaviors and activities. Key words: Interpreting Strategies; Real-life Interpreting; Corpus-based Description; Seven Professional Interpreters
Interpreting studies in the past decades has been focused largely on exploration of the (cognitive) process(ing). While the description of interpreting product is as important in unveiling the nature of interpreting, this aspect has remained under-explored. The present research is a descriptive study of strategies and standards in interpreting based on the observation of seven professional interpreters’ performance in real-life interpreting. It focuses on the exploration target-language communication strategies employed in their interpreting.
It is ideal that the description of strategies and standards in interpreting should be based on large-scale homogeneous data of real-life interpreting. Yet there are methodological obstacles (ref. Shlesinger, 1989) in data-collection: the strict rule of confidentiality as an important code of ethics in the interpreting profession, reluctance of interpreters in recording their “imperfect” performance, variability of interpreting scenarios and working conditions impairing the representativeness of research data, to name just a few. In spite of the above obstacles, the author managed to collect a relatively large pool of homogeneous data from the Chinese Premier Annual Press Conferences. Since 1998 the press conferences have been broadcast live on TV every year and it is convenient to record them. Until 2011 there are altogether 14 press conferences with a total recording length of over 26 hours. The data collected from the press conferences is also typical with speakers of different styles and representative professional interpreters. During the 14 years from 1998 to 2011, there are two Premiers with different speaking style and delivery rate (One speaks relatively fast and the other relatively slowly). The interpreting of the press conferences is done by a representative group of professional interpreters. All interpreters are in-house interpreters from the Interpreting & Translation Section of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Five of them are female and two are male interpreters. The working profiles of the seven interpreters are as follow:
As is seen from the above table, some of the seven interpreters worked for more than one press conference. In order to make the data representative enough, one conference is chosen to represent the performance of each interpreter. Since Interpreter 3 worked for three press conferences with two different major speakers, two press conferences are chosen to represent his performance. Therefore, eight press conferences are chosen to build the corpus for analysis. As a result, the Corpus of Chinese-English Interpreting for Premier Press Conferences (CEIPPC) of over 100,000 words is built up with the transcript of video recordings of the interpreting done by seven interpreters. The interface of the corpus in ParaConc is shown in Figure 2.
In order to identify the strategies of interpreting in the corpus, the analytical tool of “shifts” is employed in the source-text and target-text comparative analysis. As an important analytical tool in descriptive translation studies (DTS), the term “shifts” refers to changes in the target text as compared with the source text (ref. Leuven-Zwart, 1989, 1990; Toury, 1980, 1995; etc.). There are two kinds of “shifts” according to Toury (1995: 57): “obligatory shifts” and “optional shifts.” While “obligatory shifts” means the necessary changes caused by the systemic formal differences between the source and target texts, “optional shifts” refers to those changes which are optional and thus should be considered as reflecting the inerpreter’s decision-making process and choice of strategies. Whether there are the changes of addition or the changes of reduction, or the changes of correction over the source text, such phenomena in the target text of interpreting reflect the conscious decision-making and choice of strategies. Therefore, the present study focuses on the examination of “optional shifts” in the target text of interpreting and “obligatory shifts” are not counted here. It must also be pointed out that shifts do not mean translation errors and translation errors are not be included in the category of shifts in the present study. Through systematic inter-textual comparison between the source texts and target texts, the following three types of “shifts” are found in the corpus: 1) Type A shifts (Addition) including five sub-types: A1 shifts (addition of cohesive devices), A2 shifts (informational addition and elaboration), A3 shifts (explicitation of intended meaning), A4 shifts (repetition), A5 shifts (addition proper); 2) Type R shifts (Reduction) including two sub-types: R1 shifts (omission) and R2 shifts (compression); 3) Type C’ shifts (Correction). After a macro-analysis with statistics revealing the average occurrences of every type of shifts across conferences and the frequency of shifts in the interpretation of each interpreter (for details, ref. Wang, 2012), a micro-analysis is conducted here to examine some major types of shifts closely in order to identify the strategies of interpreting employed by the interpreters. 1) A1 shifts: explicitation of logic relations Interpreters add either textual cohesive devices or logic connective expressions to their target texts in interpreting to make the implicit textual or logic relations in the source texts explicit.
A categorized survey of the cohesive devices added in the target texts of their interpreting is shown in the following table:
2) A2 shifts: specificity in information content A2 shifts refer to the addition and elaboration of contextual information, situational information, background information and cultural information in the target texts. Example:
3) A3 shifts: explicitness in utterance meaning Interpreters make explicit in the target text what is intended but implicit in the source text of the speaker. Example:
A categorized survey of A3 shifts in the target texts of their interpreting is shown in the following table:
4) A4 shifts: a strategy of self-monitoring and correction and of buffering in cognitive processing Interpreters employ a parallel structure for a single sense unit in their interpretation, with the second part reiterating the first part or used as a more accurate or a better version of expression in the target language. Example:
A categorized survey of A4 shifts in the target texts of their interpreting is shown in the following table:
5) R2 shifts: compression of loose structures and redundancy in the source text Interpreters compress loose structures and redundancy in the source text and make them streamlined in the target language expression. Example:
On the basis of the macro-analysis with statistics revealing the average occurrences of every type of shifts across conferences and the frequency of shifts in the interpretation of each interpreter (Wang, 2011) as well as the above micro-analysis, it can be concluded that the interpreters tend to employ the following strategies in their interpreting: 1) Explicitation in logic relations 2) Specificity of information content 3) Explicitness of utterance meaning 4) Self-monitoring and correction 5) Compression of loose structures and redundancy in the source text
As the above micro-analysis of the interpreted text reveals, interpreters’ utilization of shifts always helps to get the information and meanings from the speaker across to the audience in a better way. From this perspective, shifts in interpretation should not be categorized simply as “deviation” or “translation error” (cf. Barik, 1969). The primary motivation for interpreters to adopt the above-mentioned strategies is their pursuit for the optimization of communicative effect, i.e. they make shifts in order to help the audience understand the speaker clearly and accurately. According to Gile (1995: 201), interpreters do not choose their tactics (or strategies) at random, but they seem to follow rules, sometimes consciously, often unconsciously. Among them, the rule of “maximizing the communication impact of the speech” (ibid) is an important one. The present study may serve as an empirical evidence for that hypothesized rule (or standard). It also provides further evidence for the roles that interpreters play in real-life interpreting. This study shows that interpreters not only assume the role of linguistic mediator, but also act as communicative mediator and cross-cultural mediator. Interpreters’ adaptation of such strategies in interpreting as explicitation in logic relations, specificity of information content explicitness of utterance meaning and compression of loose structures and redundancy identified in the present study seems to point to some general features of interpreted texts. There is great potential for further descriptive study of strategies based on large corpus of on-site interpretation in revealing the universal features of interpreted texts (or “interpretese” according to Shlesinger, 2008). Studies along the same line may also shed new light on interpreting quality studies in that quality assessment should be based more on strategies and standards in real-life interpreting rather than based solely on such static quality criteria as the concept of equivalence between the source and target languages.
[1] Barik, H. 1969. A Study of Simultaneous Interpretation [D]. Doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina. [2] Leuven-Zwart, K.M.van. 1989. Translation and original: Similarities and dissimilarities, I [J]. Target 1 (2): 151-81. [3] Leuven-Zwart, K.M.van. 1990. Translation and original: Similarities and dissimilarities, II [J].Target 2 (1): 69-95. [4] Shlesinger, M. 1989. Extending the theory of translation to interpretation: Standards as a case in point. Target 1 (1): 111-115. [5] Shlesinger, M. 2008. Towards a definition of interpretese [A]. In Gyde Hansen, Andrew Chesterman and Heidrun Gerzymisch-Arbogast (eds.) Efforts and Models in Interpreting and Translation Research [C], Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 237-253. [6] Toury, G. 1980. In Search of Translation Theory [M]. Tel Aviv: The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. [7] Toury, G. 1995. Translation Studies and Beyond [M]. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co. [8] Wang, Binhua. 2009. Description of Standards in Interpreting and Its Application – A Study Based on the Corpus of Consecutive Interpreting in Chinese Premier Press Conferences [D]. PhD dissertation, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies[9] Wang, Binhua. 2012. A Descriptive Study of Standards in Interpreting – Based on the Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting Corpus of Chinese Premier Press Conferences [J]. Meta, 57 (1). | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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nterpreters’ on-site interpreting performance is shaped by three major factors: a) the interpreter’s interpreting competence, b) on-site
cognitive conditions and c) strategies and standards of interpreting (Wang, 2009). The following figure shows how the interpreting performance is
shaped by the three major forces in combination.
