The subject of this book is consecutive interpreting. An orphan among its translation peers, consecutive interpreting appears to have a short life and little if any luster. It also evokes little wonder: standing close to the everyday and its dweller, consecutive interpreting invites us to take for granted both its existence and its meaning. In comparison to written translation and other types of interpreting, consecutive interpreting also spawns limited academic interest, producing exclusive empirical accounts which center on the interpreterâs performance and its indicators or, when tackled in abstraction, accuracy of linguistic reproduction and cross-comparisons of linguistic outcomes. It is extremely rare that the phenomen on itself would be isolated for academic scrutiny, especially so when it comes to a philosophical inquiry. This book seeks to redress this state of affairs by offering an interdisciplinary respecification of the phenomenon. The term ârespecificationâ points to the work of hermeneutic phenomenology , which seeks to recover the authentic sense of a phenomenon, its original identity, including the name that would be proper to the new identity, its constitutive specifics as well as its aesthetics and the ethical potential.1 Currently, consecutive interpreting appears under many guises, including such aliases as âoral ,â âliaison,â âdialogue ,â âcommunity ,â or â interlingual.â In this book, I have chosen to present the subject of this investigation under the name âconsecutive interpreting.â In contrast to other modifiers that designate this type of interpreting, the word âconsecutiveâ is free from the misleading associations with a specific language medium or the interpreterâs mediating role. In contrast, âconsecutiveâ implies live interaction , pointing to the embeddedness of consecutive interpreting in communication which makes it immediately distinguishable from other types of interpreting as both a presence and a consequence.
The connection of consecutive interpreting to the ordinary explains the use of phenomenology for this project. Originally designed to examine and challenge the natural attitude , phenomenology identifies this attitude with the human propensity to deproblematize the life-world by constructing it largely in functional terms, which emphasize âuse,â the preferred operation of mundane sociality. By employing phenomenology, we can examine the apparent ordinariness of consecutive interpreting in terms of its authentic rather than prescribed sense. Phenomenology distinguishes between the two because we often see the main purpose of consecutive interpreting in connecting us to a multitude of different worlds and their inhabitants. On the basis of this assumption, we have little doubt that in order to understand and therefore relate to these worlds, they must be communicated to us. Among many forms of interlingual communication, face-to-face communication stands out as the most effective tool of building an immediate bridge between different language communities. One of the most ordinary forms of interlingual communication , consecutive interpreting suggests a capacity of negotiating linguistic and cultural differences in situ, as we do by conversing with one another. At the same time, consecutive interpreting is not a phenomenon whose relation to human proximity means that it shall be easy to capture. Like speech itself, it âlivesâ only as long as there is talk involved; after having marked its presence, it dissipates as quickly, apparently making little if any difference to the social world at large.
This âeasy-to-seeâ but âhard-to-getâ nature of consecutive interpreting points to yet another task this book is designed to undertake: in addition to recovering the authentic sense of the phenomenon, it seeks to establish the significance of this form of communication for the social realm. In performing both tasks, phenomenality of consecutive interpreting is not to be achieved experimentally or quantitatively in the fashion common for social sciences, but, following the main phenomenological tenets, it must be discovered through the thick description and, as I am going to argue, be supplanted by the empirical analysis . The empirical connection is going to be carried out through those qualitative methods in communication that are compatible with phenomenology, namely, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. With this orientation we arrive at the preliminary question for this study: How does one respecify consecutive interpreting? I suggest that in order to answer this question, we must focus on the following concepts: structure (eidos), purpose (telos), and origin (genesis). This book attends to all the three foci in a comprehensive phenomenological-empirical inquiry.2 Before launching this inquiry, however, I would like to describe various facets (manifestations) of consecutive interpreting, showing that in different capacities it indeed permeates our everyday life, making the phenomenon recognizable in its natural environment and therefore observable and describable. I call them âfacets of translation,â although it would be more apt to call them âfacesâ since, from the mundane perspective, the activity of consecutive interpreting has but the front and is always embodied and thus enfaced. I must reiterate that the purpose of this introduction is only to show how translation, in general, and consecutive interpreting, in particular, constitute the fabric of our ordinary lives. At the same time, by showing different facets of consecutive interpreting, I will be priming it, as it were, for the subsequent focused investigations. A variety of âreal-lifeâ examples of consecutive interpreting and a number of theoretical accounts will be utilized to this effect.
If the existence of consecutive interpreting is beyond doubt, its significance for the social world and its affairs remains obscure. At critical times, however, when the human ability of living together falls under question, when we begin to question our capacity of communicating with a cultural other, our familiarity with the phenomenon turns into an aspiration to know interpreting as the very thing that makes this kind of communication possible, promising crucial insights into different human worlds and their relations.3 This promise came particularly true for the current generation, which saw our subject in association with ideological, political, economic, and demographic crises that brought interpreting to the fore in the 1990s with a strongly critical emphasis. Appropriate to the chosen method, this emphasis was reminiscent of the one described by the founder of the phenomenological movement, Edmund Husserl , in his monograph The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Written shortly before World War II, The Crisis argued that the development of natural sciences brought about idealization of the life-world, leading to its forgetfulness, creating in the same breath a certain belief in the primacy of the ideal, the belief that would foreshadow concrete experiences , their messiness, viscera, and wonder, prompting the human crisis that could not be mitigated in any other way but only by âputting the most obvious into questionâ (Husserl 1970a, p. 180). Among the most âobviousâ facts, Husserl names presence, science, and ego. Our overwhelming belief in the latter over absence, intuition, and community often prevents us from reflecting on the life-world, our own world, and its social dimensions and variations. Husserlâs major contribution to both phenomenology and the human sciences in that regard deals with the fact that he subsequently questioned and reversed the preponderance of exactitude in an elaborate argument that brought the philosophical science of phenomenology into being. In a similar reversal, I would like to reinstitute consecutive interpreting as a phenomenon which is grounded in the life-world and thus privileges intersubjectivity and sociality.
At the same time, by simply accepting the primacy of the social world over the individual, or of the many over the few, we are by no means guaranteed to arrive at the authentic sense of translation in any of its forms.4 Indeed, when the twenty-first century marched in replete with remarkable technological advances, it also came carrying a promise that the new electronic media, diverse means of communication, and international social networks could provide equal access to information and other shareable resources. This century also promised a different kind of sociality, a mobile interactive sociality ensured by unhindered and therefore fast multiparty communication, which appeared particularly beneficial for all kinds of intercultural exchanges. The subject of this book, interpreting, seemed to be a natural extension of the communication revolution. Founded on the possibility of interaction across languages and cultures, virtual communication in the global world depends on the coding and decoding culture and therefore on translating it, regardless of whether this translation involves an actual human face or an electronic screen , a human voice or a paper script.
Today, translated are not just works, words, ideas, or academic themes but entire political systems, such as the regimes of the post-Soviet Eastern Europe, Middle East, Central and Southeast Asia, China, and the newly developed political systems of Northern Africa. The acting presumption behind these translations is that there indeed exists a âgoodâ model, an original, if you will, and that it could be re-enacted across contexts, that is, be translated. As it has become increasingly clear from the recent events that took place in the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the exchange of a clear original for a corrupt copy does nothing more than swap authenticity for ideality, as was criticized by Husserl a century ago.5 And when the best political intentions, economic models, and lifestylesâor as they are called by some, âways of lifeââget lost in translation, creating bad copies, distorted reflections, unlikely phantasms, and blind paradigms of formal logic , shall we not realize that translation and its varieties are phenomena of their own which possess their own identities, appearances, and histories?
The answer to this question cannot be straightforward already because at all times we deal with two senses of translation : translation per se, or the idea of translation, and different kinds and species of translational practice, including consecutive interpreting. For phenomenological reasons it is not necessary to separate translation per se from the translational practice (praxis). Moreover, according to Martin Heidegger, the two senses can be fused in the symbolic realm where translation appears as a figure. The usefulness of this image for understanding the genesis of translation, the starting point of its phenomenality, is not to be ignored. In his 1942â1943 lecture course Parmenides, Heidegger explains that translation has the capacity of disclosing truth. In translation , truth appears as a mythological figure, a goddess. For the ancient Greeks, a divine figure is not some ethereal metaphysical or mythical entity but a form of materiality, even if a symbolic one. Its appearance is not to be interpreted in the human terms, for it points to the original in flight rather than to the repeatable sameness. From that perspective, the task of translation lies in reaching beyond the immediate, turning the act of translation into a voyage, similar to the one taken by the Greek adventurer Parmenides who, during his travels, happened to meet with a goddess and was invited to her home.
The experience of being within the divine abode is beyond description; it can be understood only in retrospect, as a trace of some traumatic but not necessarily negative experience. In order to comprehend the encounter, the seeker of truth and knowledge needs to employ radical reflection. Only then is he or she granted an access to the realm of truth. The access is going to be partial, however: truth is handed over to Parmenides over the threshold. He is never invited inside. It is for that reason that Heidegger names âtransportingâ as the essence of translation and assigns to interpretation, which is a hermeneutic of extension of translation, the task of carrying the âwordâ over the threshold. An interpretation is considered to be embed in translation; it cannot emerge in any other way, argues Heidegger, because translation is transcendental: it thus includes all cases. The ancient Greek concept of aletheia (ÎληΞΔÎčα) embodies this relationship by showing that truth, the English translation of aletheia, always emerges from the hidden; it is obscure in origin and ambiguous in expression , temperamental like the goddess herself, and therefore never complete, like translation. Most important, however, is that aletheia is not a phantom of our imagination but a configured materiality of the sensual world, a symbol that makes a difference to the matter of things.
Heideggerâs insistence on the relational inseparability of truth from the encounter with its figure points out the main task of translation : to disclose truth in a profound way, in the manner of a journey that implies a transformation of the voyager; hence, Heideggerâs distinction between the divinational character of translation (understood as the other of the original) and the primary mode of its own appearance, which is the twilight drawn over by the withdrawal of the original. The work of âun-concealmentâ in relation to the original comes as much from the work of aletheia as it does from translation, for the latter demands interpretation: âOnly a translation thoroughly guided by an interpretation is, within certain limits, capable of speaking for itselfâ (Heidegger 1998, p. 9). By emphasizing this relationship, Heidegger intimates the dual character of translation: it is guiding by way of explaining. To speak phenomenologically, Heidegger âfoundsâ interpretation on translation . After all, unlike written translation, its oral counterpart faces the limits of which the most human o...