Interpreting - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2005

Simultaneous film interpreting is a mode of screen language transfer often required of professional interpreters in Italy for international film festivals. The paper briefly discusses similarities and dissimilarities between film interpreting and conference interpreting, subtitling and dubbing. It focuses on interpreting quality evaluation, discussing results of questionnaires distributed to users watching films interpreted by professionals and students. Comparisons are drawn with the results of published surveys on users’ preferences for television and conference interpreting.

This paper investigates the phenomenon of repairs in simultaneous interpreting. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the paper combines research carried out in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics on speech production with studies in the pragmatics of speech reception. A principally qualitative method is used in the analysis of a trilingual corpus (English/French/German) of eight professional conference interpreters recorded at four different international conferences. This paper presents eight examples from English into two different A languages: French (5 examples) and German (3 examples). Levelt’s (1983, 1989) nomenclature of repairs in spontaneous speech is slightly amended in order to take the simultaneous interpreting process into account. The results show that interpreters not only repair errors, but take time to attend to their outputs for different reasons. The limited quantitative analysis shows a discrepancy between interpreters. The various dimensions of repair mechanisms highlighted in this paper give us some insights into the interpreter’s mind at work, or the interpreter’s deployment of processing capacities and decision-making processes.

This paper reports on an empirical study on prosody in English-German simultaneous interpreting. It discusses prosody with particular reference to its tonal, durational and dynamic features, such as intonation, pauses, rhythm and accent, as well as its main functions, i.e. structure and prominence. Following a review of previous studies on the topic, a conceptual approach for the analysis of prosody in terms of structure and prominence is developed and subsequently applied to an authentic corpus of professional simultaneous interpretation consisting of three German versions of a 72-minute English source text. Prosodic patterns in the corpus are analyzed by means of a computer-aided method using the software PRAAT. The findings confirm that prosodic features are interdependent and that those in the target texts show certain characteristics that are specific to simultaneous interpreting.

This article explores the experiences of people who need interpreters to gain access to and use of a range of services, drawing on semi-structured interviews with people from Chinese, Kurdish, Bangladeshi, Indian and Polish minority ethnic groups living in Manchester and London, UK. We describe our research methodology, and place the study in its political and community context. We look at the qualities the people we interviewed considered made for a good interpreter, and their experiences using both professional interpreters, and family and friends as interpreters. We show how personal character and trust are important in people’s understandings of good interpreting, leading them to prefer interpreters drawn from their own informal networks. We consider the implications of this for policy and practice.

In this article, the author makes a distinction between the quality-oriented assessment prevalent in translation and interpreting and the psychometric evaluation common in other disciplines. He suggests that the latter is a more appropriate approach for interpreter certification, an assessment situation where inferential decisions are made. He demonstrates how such research might be carried out in interpreting by validating both an existing conference interpreter certification test and a new test constructed according to measurement and evaluation principles.