Essays on Conference Interpreting

James Nolan

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781788928014
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Traduction et interprétation

This book condenses the important lessons learned at key points during the author's 30-year career as an intergovernmental conference interpreter and trainer, seeking to define what constitutes good interpreting and how to develop the skills and abilities that are conducive to it, as well as fostering practices and technologies that help to maintain high professional standards. The book places interpreting in its historical context as a time-honoured discipline and discusses the effect of modern technology on translating and interpreting, identifying areas where it is most useful (electronic communications media, broadcasting) while stressing that professionaleducation and training of linguists are more important than reliance on technological shortcuts. The book is an invaluable resource to all those working or training in conference interpreting, as well as being a stimulating read for those engaged in the wider work of interpreting.

1Interpreting in the Global Arena2

Interpretation can be defined in a nutshell as conveying understanding. Its value stems from the fact that a speaker’s meaning is best expressed in his or her native language but is best understood in the languages of the listeners. Human speech, consisting of sounds, can instantly convey a vast range of ideas, nuances and feelings, not all of which can be captured or represented in writing. Some emotive aspects of a spoken message are conveyed even if one does not understand the language being spoken, provided the speech is audible and there is some variability in the volume and pitch perceived. Just as a printed score is only a symbolic graphic representation of a song or musical composition, a written translation is only a written record of the author’s thoughts using a different set of symbols. The intensity, subtlety, range and ephemeral nature of human speech challenges our ability to memorialize it in a form that can be transformed into different languages. The interpreter’s specialty is rendering speech into a different language immediately, before it fades from memory.

Through the art of interpretation several complex interrelated processes converge to convey the semantic and emotive meaning of a message from one language and culture to another. The interaction of these processes and the difficulty of coordinating them simultaneously in the oral/aural mode (or in sign language) require attention,3 sensitivity, concentration and mental agility. In some ways, training for interpreting resembles training for musicianship or acting: the most fruitful approach is guided practice, individual aptitudes and skills are important, talent needs to be nurtured and encouraged, performance is improved by awareness of audience expectations, intuition plays a role, and there may be several valid ways of interpreting a particular passage or speech. The skills required for interpretation, especially simultaneous interpretation, must be developed through practice to the point where they become automatic. The reason for this is ably explained by psychologist Michael Gazzaniga in his lecture ‘The Interpreter,’ delivered at the University of Edinburgh on 15 October 2009,4 which may be viewed online.

A discussion of interpreting today must begin by putting the topic in historical perspective. Contemporary societies are in the midst of a technological transition known as ‘digitalization’ which may prove to be the most important technological advance since the invention of printing. Digital media now make it possible to channel and manage contents worldwide in real time, conveying vast volumes of data and knowledge in many languages. Those vast flows are in some ways defined by the means used to convey them.

The phrase ‘The medium is the message’ was introduced in Marshall McLuhan’s book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964. McLuhan proposed that communication is marked by the medium carrying it as much as by the content carried. He said that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not only by the content delivered over the medium, but also by the characteristics of the medium itself. The speed and efficiency of the analog media described by McLuhan (e.g. television, cinema) has been increased many times over by advances in electronic communications and digitalization. From the emergence of writing and printing during the first millennium of human history through the development of analog media during the second millennium, we now see the emergence of an era of digital media at the beginning of the third millennium, with implications for translation and interpretation and the way they are now performed.

Interpretation must be understood as an art which plays an important role in human history, not merely as a messaging function. Translation stretches the boundaries of a natural language by introducing new ideas and values that must be named in order to be referred to and discussed, and that ‘stretching exercise’ leaves a language richer, stronger and more vigorous than it was before.

As noted by Professor Juliane House, ‘Translation is a particular kind of intercultural communication aimed at intercultural understanding. Intercultural understanding is closely related to the most important concept in translation theory: functional equivalence. It can be achieved when a translation has a function in the target culture comparable to the function its original has in its cultural context.’5 However, because functional equivalence is rarely exact, it forces the mind of the listener or reader to think outside the box of his/her language, introducing an element of cognitive value added.

Because mechanical methods of translation can only use the words and rules that have been built into them, they fail to yield the added value that arises from the cognitive stretching exercise. They may display a degree of accuracy and efficiency but they lack the necessary breadth, empathy, originality and creativity to deal with a natural language, which is arguably the single most complex system known to the human mind.6

Until recently, all translation was understood to be performed by people. Now, situations arise in which the need is felt to spell out that we are referring to ‘human translation’ because verbally encoded outputs of computer algorithms are being produced and marketed as translations. See, e.g.: ‘The fact that translation is a largely invisible activity is not a problem per se; firms and administrations working in an international context still use it daily. On the other hand, the Directorate General of Translation (DGT) at the European Commission (and many experts and professionals that we contacted for this study), believe that by constantly remaining in the background, translation and especially human and professional translation may eventually be perceived as a superfluous activity, a cost that is not necessarily justified. If this perception were to spread among the citizens of Europe it could rapidly become a threat to European multilingualism, for which the translation activities in European institutions provide a solid base.’7

Some of the products of automation can be made to mimic self-conscious human thought and to parrot human speech so convincingly that the effect is like finding a genie in a magic lantern and we could almost forget that what we are hearing is synthesized verbalization rather than articulated thought. People are becoming accustomed at an early age to rely on a portable electronic device to carry out tasks of daily living to an extent that can isolate them and de-sensitize them to what is happening around them, compounding the intercultural opacity between speakers of different languages that is commonly referred to as ‘the language barrier’.

The word ‘translator’ is sometimes being loosely used by analogy in reference not to people but to devices that are in fact electronic phrasebooks structured to retrieve equivalent entries or pre-recorded phrases8 in a manner similar to the pre-recorded ‘guides’ that one can rent at some museums or zoos. Some public authorities reluctant to invest in language education and professional translation training are taking the easy way out by treating computer coding as a ‘language’ that students may opt to study in school in lieu of a second language.9 For similar reasons, complex computerized security protocols are being introduced into the process of providing language access in public services and in procedures for training and testing linguistic personnel, burdening practitioners in the belief that mechanical measures can substitute competence and integrity or safeguard against hackers. More seriously, the pervasive temptation to give in to convenience and ‘let the computer do it’ is hampering well-rounded education, depriving students of a range of benefits:

Learning a foreign language has benefits that reach beyond the ability to communicate effectively with people from other cultures. Mirta Desir, founder and CEO of Smart Coos, points to the benefits of being both bilingual and bi-literate, saying, ‘Biliteracy and bilingualism have a profound effect on the brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language.’

The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages found that learning a foreign language supports academic achievement and provides the following benefits:

•higher scores on standardized tests

•increased development of student reading ability

•transfer of skill from one language to another

•increased linguistic awareness

•increased ability of scientific hypothesizing

•offset of age-related cognitive losses

•increased problem-solving ability.

While those benefits are applicable across virtually all academic endeavors, access to classes to learn foreign languages is lacking in the American system of education.10

There is a need to define more carefully what we mean by ‘language’, what is meant by translation/interpretation,11 the nature and scope of the non-utilitarian functions it performs, and what role can or should be played by technology. Thought should also be given in this context to the hidden costs of xenophobia and nationalism in a globalized world, which can make enforced monolingualism a false economy.

With the advent of globalization we found ourselves living in a global village. Now, with the digital revolution and advances in cyber-engineering, we are moving towards a digital global village, one whose clearest external manifestation is the Internet, a virtual world that reflects an even greater and older one: ‘When you access the vast global network of computers we call the Internet, you can travel the world, find information, and interact with people in a way that was never before possible. The creation of the net was an awesome leap in technological evolution. Yet, for all that it offers, it is the merest shadow of something much larger and much older. Language is the real information highway, the first virtual world. Language is the worldwide web, and everyone is logged on.’12

In the process, we are automating and computerizing a growing number of human activities and mimicking human faculties and cultural features or memes, sometimes without regard to whether the human element of the activity constitutes its essence and makes it a suitable or unsuitable candidate for automation or mechanical replication. While no one would deny, for example, that the process of packaging pharmaceuticals in a sterile robotic environment untouched by human hands is a useful innovation, the question we now face is whether the process of transferring ideas and feelings between people of different languages and cultures can or should be carried out untouched by human minds. Much as we may appreciate the practical uses of the smartphone, one has to ask how smart it would be to allow a device to begin doing our thinking for us, regardless of how artificially ‘intelligent’ that device may become. The human brain is still the most powerful ‘computer’, and the repository of some 300,000 years of evolutionary and historical experience, and it is the awareness of that species-consciousness and cultural heritage that enables a translator or interpreter to extract the correct intended meaning from the context of an utterance in ways that elude even the best MT programs.13 According to one of the prevailing definitions used by linguists, ‘…language is not a singular phenomenon or a specific thing. Rather, it is multidimensional –interdependent and interconnected with other human abilities and other ...