Interpreting - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2008

The article documents and differentiates two kinds of translation officials in the central government of the Tang dynasty (618–906 AD) in medieval China: translators in the Court of Diplomatic Reception (Yiyu 譯語) and translators in the Secretariat (Fanshu Yiyu 蕃書譯語). The distinction between them is essential because they are often mentioned in the scholarly literature indiscriminately. Given the scarcity of historical records and the absence of focused discussions about translators in Tang times, their differences were usually either toned down as minimal or misinterpreted by modern scholarship over the past decade. Although some researchers have recently made reference to the two translator titles and agreed that their translation and interpreting duties were somewhat different, the nature of these differences has not been clearly established. Analysis of standard historical records suggests that, in fact, these two types of translators had distinct job duties. Translators in the Court of Diplomatic Reception interpreted primarily for foreign envoys, while the Secretariat’s translators chiefly translated state letters from foreign envoys. This article presents evidence to substantiate this observation and explain why such an apparently straightforward categorization has not been put forward thus far.

The paper applies cognitive theories of text and language processing, and in particular relevance theory, to the analysis of notes in consecutive interpreting. In contrast to the pre-cognitive view, in which note-taking is seen mainly as a memory-supporting technique, the process of note-taking is described as the reception and production of a notation text. Adding the relevance-theoretical constructs of explicature and implicature to the general account of cognitive text processing as coherence building and the construction of a mental representation at local and global levels, this approach allows for the comparison of source, notation and target texts with respect to the underlying propositional representation, and shows how the sense of highly fragmentary notation texts is recovered in consecutive interpreting. The paper is based on an empirical study involving consecutive interpretations (English–German) by five trainee interpreters. The analysis shows that the interpreters operate relatively closely along micropropositional lines when processing the source, notation and target texts, with the explicature regularly having the same propositional form as the corresponding proposition in the source text.

The issue of quality has attracted considerable attention recently in translation and interpreting studies. Few publications, however, seek to explore systematically the theoretical implications of the different notions of quality. The aim of this paper is to explore quality as a social construct and to examine interpretations and definitions of quality in the field of translation and interpreting studies and practice. It is evident that the notion of quality is relative, in that it depends both on the individual who is assessing quality and on the given context or specific situation, but the relativity of quality as an attribute or notion pertaining to an object also extends to the benchmarks set up in order to gauge quality. This paper will focus on the multi-perspectivity of some of the quality benchmarks that have been applied in the context of three systems within which quality discourse has developed over the years: training, professional practice and interpreting research.