Interpreting - Volume 1, Issue 1, 1996

This article,1 discusses the problems of machine translation focusing on a special task, i.e. automatic dialogue interpreting. In the translation of spoken discourse, there is an increasing tendency to use pragmatic information which is commonly associated with speech or dialogue acts in order to handle the problems encountered in speech processing.After discussing some characteristics of spoken language as well as principal constraints operating on speech-to-speech translation, we will give a very brief overview of existing approaches, and then switch to the extended description of a sample solution within the VERBMOBIL-Project where transfer is assisted by a dialogue-act component. The last section describes how, with limited use of available information, transfer based on dialogue acts might result in new solutions for existing problems.

The technical aspects of videoconferencing are described, with emphasis on the H 320 standards for the transmission of compressed video and audio streams. The implications of multilingual videoconferencing for sound and image quality in conference interpreting and the related cognitive, medical and psychological problems are then discussed. The suitability of this technique for various kinds of meetings and its cost effectiveness are also touched upon.

This paper describes several features of turns in the turn-taking exchange of an interpreted meeting between a professor and a student. Analysis of the transcript of the videotaped meeting revealed 1) turns with smooth transitions, or regular turns, 2) turns with pauses and gaps, 3) turns that occur when speakers talk at the same time, and 4) turns initiated by the interpreter. Interviews with all three participants demonstrate that they interact in complex ways. Both speakers and the interpreter create unique kinds of pauses, lag, overlapping talk, and turns. This analysis demonstrates the active involvement of the interpreter in managing face-to-face interaction.

The authors provide two perspectives on the teaching of consecutive interpreting: The pragmatic approach and the cognitive justification. Consecutive interpreting is described as requiring outstanding skills in language comprehension and production; the article provides relevant exercises to enhance these skills and features an overview of CI practice and teaching. It concludes with a list of references of published and non-published sources dealing with the wider aspects of the CI process.

This study addresses for the first time on an experimental level the question of whether different modalities of conscious monitoring of attention (normal condition, attention focalization on the input, attention focalization on the output, condition with two voices) may affect the number and the type of mistakes made by simultaneous interpreters in different situations. The major results of the study are the following: (i) While the overall number of mistakes is influenced either by the translation direction, or by any of the four tested attention focalization modalities, a particular type of mistakes, i.e. those leading to loss of information, occur more often during active SI (from L1 into L2, i.e. from A to B) of difficult texts; (ii) during passive SI of difficult texts, missing information mistake are less frequent when interpreters listen to the incoming message with their left ear only; (iii) in active SI of difficult texts, attention should not be focussed on the incoming message in particular, so as to avoid so-called added mistakes. These results show that during simultaneous interpretation, conscious attention focalization on the input or on the output does not influence the interpreter's overall performance, however with an important exception: during active interpretation it could be useful for interpreters to focus their attention on the output, since this may help them to reduce in particular false starts, pauses, hesitations, corrections, additions and morphosyntactic mistakes.