Interpreting - Volume 3, Issue 2, 1998

This is a report on a pilot project commissioned by the BBC in conjunction with the author's final MA dissertation for Durham University. The purpose of the research was to investigate British Sign Language (BSL) production on television and its comprehension by the viewing audience. The data analysis could then be used for programme decisions relating to cultural and linguistic specifications. This is especially pertinent in view of the current Broadcasting Act in Great Britain, which stipulates 1% of sign language transmission on all digital and terrestrial television by 1999 and an increase to 5% by 2009.1In the original research, 70 hours of signed data were recorded. Individual profiles were made for each signer on a sample tape as well as a thorough description of a respondent group.The research focused on a comprehension test.This involved three group categories reflecting two varieties of sign language users, a group whose BSL is most informed (influenced) by English, another whose BSL is dominant, and a hearing (non-signing) group used for comparison. All sample and test responses were analysed and profiled in view of signing production and psychosocial treatment of the language. The use of sign language on television was compared with its wider use among deaf people.This paper summarises and concludes the discussion and recommendations that may be directly referred to by programme makers and translators/interpreters.2

This paper explores an important variable affecting interpretation quality, usually considered a major source of difficulty for interpreters: the situation in which speakers read their texts. In particular, it focuses on the reading aloud of English language texts to be interpreted simultaneously. A corpus consisting of ten authentic speeches recorded during various conferences has been analyzed. Five of them were delivered by native speakers, the other five by non-native speakers. The analysis of the corpus has been performed on the transcriptions of the oral delivery of the written texts. Several features have been analyzed, ranging from the peculiarities of written texts, such as high lexical density and lack of redundancy (i.e. assessment of whether the texts presented such features even when delivered orally) to the departures speakers made from the written texts, to pauses and speech rate. The article concludes with a number of practical suggestions speakers should be advised to follow before reading texts that are to be interpreted simultaneously, in order to facilitate the interpreter's task.

Existing simultaneous interpretation (SI) process models lack an account of intermediate representation compatible with the cognitive and linguistic processes inferred from corpus descriptions or psycholinguistic experimentation. Comparison of SL and TL at critical points in synchronised transcripts of German-English and Chinese-English SI shows how interpreters use procedural and intentional clues in the input to overcome typological asymmetries and build a dynamic conceptual and intentional mental model which supports fine-grained incremental comprehension. An Executive, responsible for overall co-ordination and secondary pragmatic processing, compensates at the production stage for the inevitable semantic approximations and re-injects pragmatic guidance in the target language. The methodological and cognitive assumptions for the study are provided by Relevance Theory and a 'weakly interactive' parsing model adapted to simultaneous interpretation.