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Recent trends in research into conference interpreting
Daniel Gile
Universite Lumiere Lyon 2
1. Introduction
The history of conference interpreting research (CIR) is interesting on several accounts. Firstly, it is that of an emerging discipline, which has yet to find its identity in the existing academic world. This aspect of its early development is particularly interesting insofar as CIR could take its theoretical and methodological framework very naturally from several disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive psychology and communication theory, which sometimes differ markedly in their positions and methods. Secondly, most of the research has been carried out by conference interpreters, not by "professional" academics or researchers, which raises fundamental issues in terms of research expertise and motivation (which will only be briefly mentioned here). Thus, an analysis of CIR can yield interesting insights into both sociological issues (see for instance Gile 1995a) and research training issues.
This paper firstly reviews the history of CIR from its inception until the late eighties in some detail, and then focuses on the last decade pointing out salient developments and issues and indicating bibliographic sources for further documentation. Note that this paper focuses on conference interpreting, but that other types of interpreting, in particular court interpreting and community interpreting, are developing interestingly (see for instance Roberts et al. 2000).
2. The "pre-scientific" period
In previous reviews of research into conference interpreting (see for instance Gile 1994, 1995a, 2000), interpretation research was divided into 4 historical periods, a classification which will be used here as well.
In the first or "pre-scientific period", in the fifties and early sixties, practicing interpreters looked at interpreting introspectively and prescriptively. It is of some interest that while some of their thoughts were challenged by later research, many of the points they raise are still topical. One very important point which seems to have been clear from the start to these interpreting pioneers was the need to understand the source speech beyond the words and to reach this comprehension through analysis (Herbert 1952:19, 34; Fukuii and Asano 1961), and to interpret on that basis, rather than on the basis of linguistic correspondences (Rozan 1956: 14). A second important point was that they were aware of the interpreter's cognitive limitations, even though they did not necessarily express this in the language of cognitive psychology: for instance, Van Hoof (1962) says that in simultaneous interpreting, attention must be shared (p. 39, 67); also see Kaminker's comments on Rozan quoted in Paneth 1957, reprinted and translated in Pochhacker and Shlesinger (2002: 34). In the seventies and eighties, their successors largely ignored these limitations, at least in terms of research (see further down).
Other issues of interest mentioned by these early authors in a pre-scientific stage are the requirement for a highly available lexicon in the interpreter's mind (Herbert 1952: 5), linguistic interference (Herbert 1952: 36), and the difficulty arising from syntactic differences between the source language and the target language (Fukuii and Asano 1961). Finally, it is interesting to note that both Herbert and Van Hoof consider that simultaneous interpreting is nothing but accelerated consecutive. This opinion was sustained for a long time by other authors from the interpreting world, in spite of the fact that intuitively, genuine differences could arise from the role played by long-term memory in consecutive, but not in simultaneous, and from the simultaneous presence of the two languages in the interpreter's short-term memory in the simultaneous mode, but not in consecutive.
The absence of references to research into psychology or linguistics in all these early writings suggests that the ideas which they discuss result from introspection, and were not picked up from scientific writings in the relevant disciplines. If that is so, one should note that this initial non-academic introspection gave interpreters some interesting insights into interpreting cognition.
3. The Experimental psychology period
In the sixties and first half of the seventies, a few psychologists and psycholinguists showed interest in simultaneous interpreting. As shown in Gile 2000, their quantitative contribution to the field is very small, with a total of about 20 publications, including 2 doctoral dissertations. In qualitative terms, however, they set the ground for further cognitive studies, as opposed to linguistic, sociological or other paradigms.
This period is probably best represented as viewed by cognitive psychologists by Gerver's 1976 review of experimental research into conference interpreting from Oleron and Nanpon (1965) to Goldman-Eisler (1967, 1968), Barik (1969) and Gerver himself on the psychology side, and from Pinter (1969) and Kru?ina (1971) to Chernov (1969, 1973) on the interpreters' side.
On the whole, these scientists from established disciplines recognized the complexity of interpreting and stressed the fact that their approach was only preliminary, descriptive and exploratory rather than theory-oriented. Gerver, the only author in this group who proposed a model for interpreting, did so very carefully, introducing it with the words "it does not appear premature to discuss what can be guessed about the process…" (Gerver 1976: 191).
One should also note that these researchers from cognate disciplines were not unaware of potential methodological problems in their studies. Notwithstanding some of the accusations leveled against them later, they did not mistake interpreting for word-for-word translation. Neither did they consider that untrained bilinguals could perform interpreting tasks like interpreters, and they did try to include professional interpreters as subjects in their studies (see for instance Oleron and Nanpon in Pochhacker and Shlesinger 2002: 49, and Gerver 197: 166-167, 202). They repeatedly stressed that their studies are only first approximations, and made no strong claims about interpreting on the basis of their findings.
4. The Practitioner's period
These early psychologists and psycholinguists were not unaware of the interpreters' own ideas about interpreting. In his 1976 review, Gerver quotes Chernov, Glemet, Kade and Cartellieri, Kru?ina, Paneth, Pinhas, Pinter and Seleskovitch. Going one step further, Gerver and Sinaiko oganized a symposium in Venice designed, inter alia, to foster collaborative research between the two groups (Gerver and Sinaiko 1978: 1-2). It turned out that instead of marking the beginning of an interdisciplinary research period, this symposium marked the end of the initial involvement of researchers from the cognate disciplines, and the beginning of an isolationistic period, at least in the West. This claim is explained elsewhere (see for instance Gile 1995a), but it may be useful to recall a few central points here:
In the mid-seventies, Danica Seleskovitch of ESIT became very active in promoting research into interpreting and launched her doctoral program in translation and interpreting science in Paris. Her personal drive and ambition inspired many authors, as evidenced by high production levels in Paris in the seventies (see the data in Gile 2000). In qualitative terms, her influence was also very strong, as evidenced inter alia by the central place of ESIT in the Venice symposium, and by the numerous references to her ideas and her writings during the seventies and eighties. Her influence in terms of interpreter training is still very important in many interpreter training centers worldwide, including Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, in particular thanks to Choi Jungwha's efforts, and through the Korean Society of Conference Interpretation, as evidenced by papers published in Conference Interpretation and Translation (see for example Lim 2001, Cheong 2001).
With respect to research into interpreting, two aspects of Selskovitch's position are arguably the most important:
- Firstly, she was strongly biased against linguists and psychologists and their methods (see for example Seleskovitch 1978, 1982: 295). Her concerns are essentially the lack of ecological validity of linguistics and psychology research in general, and of experimental research into interpreting in particular, as well as the meaninglessness of quantitative research when investigating the nature of language communication and of interpreting (Seleskovitch 1997:28).
- Secondly, her own view of interpreting cognition was centered around the idea that interpretation is essentially a reformulation of a "sense" or "message" in deverbalized form, after said message has been "extracted" from the source speech (for a description in Korean, see Cheong 2001). According to her, the comprehension and reformulation processes use both linguistic and extra-linguistic knowledge and occur effortlessly, provided interpreters have the necessary baseline knowledge and skills. Language-specific differences between the source language and target language are irrelevant (Seleskovitch 1981: 20).
The result of these two elements was that:
- Seleskovitch and her followers avoided using psychological and linguistic theories and research in their own work. A handful of general references to Piaget, Saussure and other "classical" authors are found, as well as a couple of references to French neurophysiologist Barbizet, but recent advances and specific empirical studies by psychologists, linguists and interpreters using their methods were never discussed.
- The "Paris school", as Seleskovitch and her group came to be called, avoided experimental research - though Seleskovitch's own PhD (Seleskovitch 1975 is its published version) was an empirical study. Most of their work was based on recordings of actual interpretation and speculation on the reasons for their reformulation choices, with illustrations being favored over comprehensive analysis.
Within the ESIT group, besides Seleskovitch's study (1975), Lederer (1978) studied the transcript of a conference and developed the idea that comprehension in interpreting is achieved by successive "units of meaning", which crystallize when the incoming speech and the interpreter's knowledge of the topic and context make an inference possible. Dejean Le Feal (1978), who speculated on the differences between read speeches and spoken speeches, says that the recordings in her corpus are clearly not numerous enough to demonstrate statistically the hypotheses she formulates, and that these are essentially the results of almost twenty years of professional practice (p.8-9). Judging by a number of statements in Seleskovitch, Lederer and Dejean Le Feal's publications about "verbal memory", "echoic memory", "immediate memory", the amount of information that can be stored in such "immediate memory", and the rapid loss of the linguistic form of sentences from memory, it is likely that at least some of them have read either reports of empirical research by psychologists, or references to such research, but since no references are given in their own texts, this is difficult to ascertain.
At the same time, in the USSR, Chernov developed his own model of simultaneous interpreting around the concept of "probability prediction". His model is one where perception of the incoming speech advances in discrete portions, as more information becomes available for inferencing and anticipation at several levels of language. The second model in the Soviet school is Shiryayev's, quoted in Chernov (1992). Shiryayev sees simultaneous interpreting as composed of actions on successive source language segments; each action consists of several stages, essentially the orientation stage, the preparation of the translation decision, and its implementation. Simultaneousness occurs when the source speech is delivered rapidly, and the implementation of the translation decision becomes automatic. The process is managed by a "synchronization mechanism". The Soviet school's approach is open to the psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology, as evidenced by Chernov's numerous references to current psycholinguistic and psychological research.
During the Practitioners' period, some interpreters did show interest in interdisciplinarity. After Pinter (1969), the first of these was Barbara Moser, an interpreter who took cognitive psychologist Massaro's speech comprehension and developed it in her doctoral dissertation (1976) to represent a flow diagram of the temporal course of simultaneous interpreting. In 1979, Linda Anderson, of Canada, completed an experimental MA thesis in which she compared the performance of interpreters interpreting with and without previous knowledge of the speech and with and without an image of the speaker on a monitor, and tested the existence of a language-switching processing increment in the interpretation process, taking EVS as an indicator and comparing simultaneous interpretation from French into English and from English into English. Another study conducted within the same paradigm is Mackintosh's MA dissertation (1983), who attempted to determine whether there are differences in message loss between direct and relay conditions. Interestingly and counter-intuitively, Mackintosh did not find significant differences between the conditions.
In Germany, mention could be made of Kade and Cartellieri from Leipzig, as well as of Wilss in Saarbrucken, who looked at linguistic issues, and in particular syntactic dissimilarities and their strategic implications (see for example Wilss 1978). But Kirchhoff, from Heidelberg, is probably the German scholar whose attention was most focused on interpreting cognition. In Kirchhoff 1976, she refers to cognitive load, to attention division, to strategies, and analyzes simultaneous and consecutive as differing in their respective use of short-term memory and long-term memory (see the translated text in Pochhacker and Shlesinger 2002: 111-119). It is rather unfortunate that most of her papers were not published and that she did not receive more attention outside Germany.
A last example of interpreter interest in research into interpreting during the practitioner's period is Gile's Effort Model for simultaneous interpreting, developed in the early 1980's to help explain the persistent difficulties interpreters encounter when working in the booth. This model looks at interpreting from a capacity management viewpoint, and considers potential problem triggers (see for instance Gile 1995a, 1999a). Interestingly, while the model was developed when Gile, who had been a student at ESIT, was not aware of the ideas and publications of scholars outside the ESIT group, it incorporated concepts rather similar to those of both psychologists and other interpreting scholars such as Kirchhoff. At that time, Gile's empirical research on cognitive issues, in particular a much replicated experiment on linguistic variability when verbalizing simple ideas (see for instance Gile 1995b) and a naturalistic study showing that linguistic deviations from acceptability where far more numerous in simultaneous than in consecutive, and in consecutive then in spontaneous presentations (Gile 1987), were not directly related to the Effort Models.
During the same period, very little research into interpreting was done by psychologists. One exception was Sylvie Lambert, a student of Gerver's, whose experimental doctoral dissertation (Lambert 1983) compared recall after listening, shadowing and simultaneously interpreting for indications about interpreting cognition in terms of the depth of processing hypothesis.
Summing up research during this "Practitioners' period", the following trends emerge:
1. Interpreters became involved in CIR. Their concern was with holistic issues, i.e. an insight into "the way interpreting functions", rather than with specific components.
2. Most of them did so on the basis of introspection and speculation, with a varying amount of input from cognate disciplines. German interpreters tended to draw on linguistic research, and Soviet interpreters on psycholinguistics research. Interpreters who were part of or inspired by the "Paris school" largely ignored such research from cognate disciplines, as well as research by interpreters who did draw on such input.
3. Most of the interpreters involved in such investigations carried out very little empirical research, most often either none, or a single study within the framework of their PhD or MA. In most of their empirical studies, a corpus was used for illustration purposes, and not for data extraction, with the purpose of rigorous quantitative or qualitative processing.
As a whole, it could arguably be concluded that interpreters in the Practitioner's period took the reflection of their predecessors from the "pre-scientific period" a step further in the direction of 'hard research' as it is practiced in the social sciences, but that they took very little advantage of the input of cognate sciences and of the work devoted to interpreting by psychologists and linguists in the late sixties and seventies.
5. The Renewal period
The prevailing ideas of the Practitioners' period came to be challenged with time, as expressed clearly at a symposium on interpreter training convened in November 1986 by the SSLMIT (the translation and interpreting school) of the University of Trieste (Gran and Dodds 1989). The local interdisciplinary and empirical research-oriented impetus launched at and through the SSLMIT may have been a strong factor in reviving CIR with a new approach, more in line with mainstream empirical science. During this period, roughly from the beginning of the nineties to the present day, the growth has been spectacular, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
5.1 General characteristics of research during the Renewal period
From the end of the eighties on, there was a spectacular increase in CIR production. As can be seen in table 1, computed from the IRN data base (http://person.wanadoo.fr/daniel.gile/), from an average of less than 1 publication per year in the fifties and sixties, through about 2 publications per year in the seventies and 50 per year in the eighties, production rose to close to 140 publications per year in the nineties, and slightly more in the years 2000 and 2001 (for these two years, the numbers may be much higher, since information takes one, two or more years to arrive to the data base). In the 12 years or so that have elapsed since the beginning of the Renewal period, there have been twice as many publications and studies on conference interpreting as in the previous 4 decades taken together.
Period Total production Conference proceedings MA and graduation theses Doctoral , post-doc. Dissertations Empirical studies
50s and 60s 106 0 10 7 9 (8%)
70s 187 (19/yr) 2 24 11 22 (12%)
80s 501 (50/yr) 8 50 17 51 (10%)
90s 1353 (135/yr) 21 218 24 284 (21%)
2000 155 1 31 63 64 (41%)
2001 144 1 26 4 42 (29%)
Table 1: CIR production data (from the IRN bibliography)
This higher total production is associated with a high number of MA and graduation theses, rising from a bit more than 2 a year in the 70s to 5 a year in the eighties to 22 in the nineties, 31 in the year 2000, and 26 in the year 2001.
In parallel, the proportion of publications reporting empirical studies rose considerably. From less than 8% of the total production until the end of the sixties, it rose to only 12% in spite of the experimental studies of the psychologists and psycholinguists in the "Experimental psychology period", but reached 21% in the nineties and continued to increase in the years 2000 and 2001. Interestingly, much of the empirical research comes from MA and graduation theses: 24% of them reported empirical research from the fifties to 1989, 40% for the nineties, 74% for the year 2000 and 85% for the year 2001. These proportions are consistently more than twice as high as the total number of empirical studies reported in the literature, and this estimate is conservative, since many of them are also reported as papers at least once or twice in either journals or collective volumes.
Thirdly, while it is true that some parts of the world where CIR is done have remained largely isolated, mostly for linguistic and/or economic reasons (much data is probably missing on research in East-European and Asian countries), communication between CIR researchers worldwide has developed spectacularly, thanks to changes in geo-political scene, to new communication technology and to the large number of translation and interpretation conferences which are being organized every year (see further down).
5.2 The authors and research centers
When looking at the names of authors of CIR publications, demographic development in the community seems dramatic: from less than 100 authors in the 1970's, to about 200 in the eighties, to more than 400 in the nineties (see table 4 in Gile 2000). Unfortunately, many of these authors only wrote one graduation thesis, and sometimes a paper summarizing it, and then stopped as they went into the labor market. In other words, the graduation thesis system seems to be more instrumental in keeping supervisors on their toes than in actually increasing the size of the CIR community. The number of active and very active authors in the community has remained small, about 10 who have published on average more than one text per year over the past decade, and about 15 who have published on average more than one text every two years over the past decade. Some of them are "veteran authors" from the seventies and eighties (Gile, Kurz and Moser-Mercer), and some are relative newcomers (Pochhacker, Setton, Shlesinger) - see Pochhacker 1995.
A further point is that the CIR community in Western Europe is made up of interpreters only, and has not been able to attract researchers from cognate disciplines. One noteworthy exception was Franco Fabbro, a neurophysiologist from Trieste who worked in close cooperation with both the teaching staff and the graduating students of the SSLMIT (see for instance Riccardi et al. 2001). Fabbro left Trieste a few years ago, and the future of cooperative research at Trieste in the neurophysiological paradigm is somewhat uncertain. Other authors, from cognitive psychology and linguistics in particular, have written papers about interpreting, but mostly talking about what their field could contribute to interpreting, as opposed to actual research. In other parts of the world, including Japan, and perhaps Korea (Kang 2001 is rather technical in its linguistic analysis), linguists maybe more actively involved.
A last but particularly interesting point is that over the past decades, there have been important changes in the map of active CIR centers worldwide. Firstly, instead of just a few centers such as France, Germany, Switzerland in Western Europe and Czechoslovakia, East Germany and the USSR in Eastern Europe, there are now foci of CIR activities worldwide. Moreover, the relative productivity of these centers has changed radically over the past 10 years or so. While ESIT, in France, was by far the most productive center of CIR activity in the eighties, in the nineties, it has virtually stopped producing research (see Gile 2000). Instead, Italian universities, a Japanese interpreters' association (see Tsuuyakukenkyuu 2000), Finnish universities and Charles University in Prague have become particularly productive. All of these, except the Japanese interpreters' association, have contributed mostly through empirical MA studies, and thus have changed the CIR scene qualitatively, as well as quantitatively (see further down).
5.3 The topics
While there is considerable diversity in the topics covered by conference interpreting literature over the past decade, due to space limitations, only four major axes will be discussed here. A relatively comprehensive list of research studies reported in either publications or theses and dissertations, is available in the online IRN Bulletin.
5.3.1 Training
As a topic in the literature, training is as popular as ever, and rates as number one (more than 20% of the publications in the IRN bibliography) over the last decade. Interestingly, many papers discuss student progress and training methods in consecutive. Such research is mostly done by interpreting instructors. Most of it is prescriptive (i.e. discussing what training should be like), or descriptive in a report-mode rather than a research mode (i.e. without any attempt to uncover unknown facts or trends, or to test ideas and theories using one research paradigm or another). This large part of the interpreting literature, which comprises many books (for instance Gran and Dodds 1989, Garzone et al. 1990, Gile 1995b, Monacelli 1999, Iliescu Gheorghiu 2001) can best be classified as professional literature or didactic literature rather than as research literature. Nevertheless, there are some actual research studies within this area of interest.
Among the most recent studies, Cai 2000 studies the evolution of consecutive interpretation expertise of beginning students, advanced students and professionals, Mead 2002 looks more specifically at the evolution in their pause patterns, and Bottan 2001 examines the actual effect of a short training course on the quality of students' delivery in consecutive.
5.3.2 Language issues
After the Practitioners' period, during which language- and linguistics-related research on conference interpreting were not viewed favorably, attitudes have changed dramatically. Many empirical studies, including a number of MA and graduation theses, describe language-specific related interpreting difficulties and strategies (for Korean, see for instance Han 2001 Kang 2001, Kim 1994, Kim 2001, Yom 1993, Yom 2001), as these are considered to be of interest and value both for training purposes and for better insight into actual interpreting behavior as a function of linguistic, intercultural and other difficulties.
Besides relatively simple language-related studies, there have been a few studies using more sophisticated linguistic theories and paradigms. To take but two examples, one from the very beginning of the Renewal period and one recent study:
In 1989, Shlesinger studied several speeches as they were given and interpreted in the field, and found that those which were closer to written texts in their linguistic features tended to be interpreted in a more oral-like style, and those which were closer to oral texts in their linguistic features tended to be interpreted in a more written-like style. Shlesinger and others have also shown interest in prosody and in the use of concepts from text linguistics in CIR.
In 1997, Setton developed a sophisticated model of interpreting which introduced pragmatics as a strong factor, suggesting that some pragmatic markers in source speeches relieved much of the cognitive pressure associated with syntactic differences between the source- and target language.
5.3.3 Cognitive issues
Since the very beginning of CIR, interpreting cognition was at the very center of investigation. During the Practitioners' period, findings and methods from cognitive science had been very rare. During the Renewal period, the change in that respect was just as dramatic as with respect to language issues and linguistics: interdisciplinarity became very popular, and cognitive psychology became an important reference for CIR.
The first cognitive psychology study during the Renewal period was Dillinger's 1989 dissertation, in which he compared comprehension of the source speech simultaneously interpreted by professional interpreters and untrained bilinguals. His finding that experience and training did not seem to make a big difference is difficult to generalize, in particular in view of the fact that his specially composed source speeches may have been quite different from those found in actual interpretation in the field.
Isham, a sign-language interpreter and psychologist, examined the dependency of recall of source speeches on syntactic boundaries as an indicator of the existence of deverbalization as postulated by Seleskovitch (Isham and Lane 1993). His findings proved inconclusive.
In Spain, in a productive cooperation venture between the department of translation and interpretation and the department of cognitive psychology and cognitive sciences at the University of Granada, Padilla et al. (1995) measured the performance of interpreters, non-interpreters and interpreting students in digit span and phrase span tasks, as well as in free recall tasks, and found the interpreter's scores higher than those of other subjects, showing the effect of interpreting practice on working memory. In a recent doctoral study, Liu (2001) found that such higher performances may be due to more efficient domain-specific information processing strategies rather than to higher storage capacity only.
An interesting research endeavor is a cooperative study on expertise conducted at the University of Geneva (Moser-Mercer et al. 2000). In this study, the performance of students and professional interpreters in various tasks believed to be relevant to interpreting expertise is compared. So far, sample size has been very small. In initial pilot tests with shadowing tasks, delayed auditory feedback tasks and verbal fluency tasks, clear differences were found only in delayed auditory feedback tasks.
Using a somewhat different paradigm, Kurz et al. (2000) looked at the learning styles of translation students, interpreting students, professional interpreters and psychology students using the Kolb Learning Style Inventory, and found that student interpreters and professional interpreters have similar learning styles, which differ from those of translation students.
Actually, most CIR studies which use concepts from cognitive psychology are theory-centered more than empirical research-oriented. One example of such work is Mizuno's "dynamic model of interpreting" (1993), which has a modular architecture built around the concepts of working memory, and psycholinguistic modules of natural language analysis and synthesis. Funayama's concept of "cognitive files" (1996) also draws on research on the processing of natural languages to help determine processing units in simultaneous interpreting. A last and particularly interesting example is Setton's sophisticated and innovative model of simultaneous interpreting (1996), which builds on relevance theory, cognitive semantics, mental models theory and speech-act theory.
In fact, most of the interpreting cognition-related research was done not within the cognitive psychology paradigm, which requires much knowledge and know-how not necessarily available to professional interpreters who make up nearly 100 percent of the CIR community, but within a much more holistic theoretical framework, probably best represented by two concepts, Seleskovitch's deverbalization concept, and Gile's Effort Models. The latter are rough holistic models of interpreting, initially designed for training rather than research, which have become a popular framework for both theoretical work and empirical research on cognitive aspects of interpreting.
The Effort Models divide interpretation into a listening component, a production component and a short-term memory component consistent with the intuitive view of interpreting by interpreters, and stresses the importance of cognitive load and processing capacity limitations without proposing any particular process architecture (Gile 1995a, 1995b, 1999a).
In the first stage in the theoretical development of the Effort Models after they were formulated, in the early 1980s, problem triggers which increase processing capacity requirement were identified, the interpreter's coping tactics (or "on-line strategies") were analyzed in terms of processing-capacity cost vs. benefit against underlying norms (Gile 1995b). In this framework, the availability of language for comprehension and production was recognized as an important contributor to the general processing capacity management issue, and a "gravitational model of linguistic availability" was developed (Gile 1995a, b). In this same framework, the information structure of source-speech sentences gains much importance. In an initial empirical exploration of one aspect of Japanese speeches, namely the predictable nature of many sentence endings, Gile (1992) found a large proportion of rather long predictable endings and identified predictors. This exploration is being taken further in an on-going doctoral project.
Early empirical work in the Effort-Models framework includes work by Jorg (1995) on anticipation, by Dawrant (1996) on language-specific strategies in the Chinese-English combination, by Dubslaff (1996) on pro-forms, by Schjoldager (1996) on source-text/target-text relations, by Granacher (1996) on problem triggers. More recent work includes a relatively large number of articles, theses and dissertation, such as Lamberger-Felber (1998) on the influence of texts being available for interpreters for read speeches, Mazza (2000) on numbers, Erskine (2001) on whispered interpreting, Mead (2002) on pauses in consecutive, Gile (2001) and Magli (2001) on the relative fidelity of simultaneous vs. consecutive, to name just a few.
A highly technical sub-field of CIR cognition is neurophysiological research. Most of it was conducted at the University of Trieste in cooperation with the local Institute of physiology, under the leadership of Franco Fabbro, a neurophysiologist who became interested in conference interpreting research and worked with both instructors and students. The results of this work suggest that interpreters tend to process language tasks with more involvement of both hemispheres of the brain than non-interpreters (see for example Fabbro and Gran 1997).
Neurophysiological indicators have also been used, rather tentatively at this point, to compare brain activity during interpreting into one's A language, into one's B language, and when engaging in other activities, using EEG recordings (see Kurz 1996), and PET techniques (Rinne et al. 2000). While brain activity does seem to differ depending on the type of task, it is difficult to interpret these findings, due to the very small size of samples, to the small number of studies, and to the fact that no correlation has been established between these differences and qualitative differences in actual interpreting strategies and/or performance.
5.3.4 Quality issues
Interpreting quality, a major dimension of interpreting, both for practical purposes and as a dependent variable for research, was viewed interpreter-centrically and taken for granted for a long time. The first attempts to look at it scientifically, as a weighted average of quality components, with varying weights depending on the circumstances and target audience, were made by Buhler, Gile and Kurz in the eighties (see a review in Collados Ais 1998). They were followed by many other studies, with a strong input by Kurz (also see Kurz 1996), and now make up one of the most active and replicated field of empirical research into conference interpreting. Among the most significant findings of this empirical research so far are the existence of a rather diversified range of expectations from various types of audiences (see a review in Kurz 1996), and high variability in individual judgment of quality (see for instance Gile 1999c). The implications in terms of CIR may be rather important. Also note that a large international conference on research into interpreting quality was organized recently by Collados Ais, from the University of Granada, and the proceedings should come out in the near future.
5.4 Research issues in the CIR community
5.4.1 CIR dynamics
When analyzing the reasons for the tremendous growth of CIR during the "Renewal period", three interrelated main driving forces emerge:
- The first is the institutionalization of translator and interpreter training programs within academic programs requiring some kind of research thesis for graduation (such is the case in Italy, in the Czech Republic and in Finland, three particularly productive countries in terms of CIR. In this context, one might recall that professional translator and interpreter training programs which stressed their professional, rather than academic nature, such as ESIT and ISIT in Paris or ETI in Geneva, have produced very few theses. In particular, the high production of ESIT came from instructors, as papers and doctoral dissertations.
- The second is a "snowball effect": as new academic translator and interpreter training programs are created and seek to develop and exist in the academic landscape, they organize conferences, publish proceedings, send their representatives to other conferences, encourage them to publish, which in turn encourages publication initiatives in the form of Translation Studies collections and journals.
Such dynamics are more powerful if interdisciplinarity is encouraged, since authors can feed on many different ideas, theories and paradigms. In retrospect, it is easier to understand why the dominance of a single school of thought in the seventies and eighties acted as a lid which prevented this potential creativity to unfold.
- The third driving force of CIR is the development of international communication in the nineties, associated with the numerous international conferences organized in the field of translation and interpreting by various translator and interpreter training programs, the creation of several journals devoted to interpreting (The Interpreter's Newsletter in Trieste, Tsuuyakurironkenkyuu in Tokyo, Interpreting in Geneva), the increasing awareness within the CIR community of existing translation journals (Meta, Target, The Translator, etc.), initiatives such as the creation of IR(TI)N, an international network for information on conference interpreting research, in 1990, and the development of e-mail communication.
5.4.2 Research expertise
In established research disciplines, such rapid development may lead to some weakening of institutional control of the scientific quality of a community's production, as competition by conference organizers and journal editors may lead to less stringent methodological requirements. In CIR, the situation is worse, because from the start, the scientific foundation was weak, and sometimes non-existent, the reason being that most authors of CIR publications are professional interpreters not trained as researchers. This includes most supervisors of theses and some supervisors of doctoral dissertations (but most of these are supervised by non-interpreters), who do not have the necessary expertise to either carry out solid research on their own, or to supervise their students' research.
On the other hand, conference interpreters are generally good observers of language behavior, and have a professional aptitude for picking up information, ideas and writing style. The net result is that many of their writings look like solid scientific papers, theses and dissertations, complete with the style, the terminology, the citations, popular theories, and even quantitative measurements. But when the actual rationale, citations, experimental design and implementation are studied in depth, deep flaws may appear.
In this respect, interdisciplinarity may help. One striking is example is Liu's recent doctoral dissertation (Liu 2001) on the interpreter's working memory, which has apparently benefited methodologically from an active commitment by her supervisors. Similarly, in his own doctoral dissertation on the evolution of pauses in consecutive, Mead (2002) has benefited from the guidance of Nocella, a statistician, for his statistical analysis. In other cases, especially when the doctoral candidates are mature, with much experience as interpreters, supervisors from the relevant cognate disciplines do not necessarily provide them with close guidance, and the resulting work sometimes contains serious flaws.
The situation is gradually improving, as supervisees become supervisors, as more research training initiatives are launched (the most remarkable one being the CE(T)RA summer doctoral training seminars in translation and interpreting research), and as higher quality standards are being sought.
6. Conclusion
Recent developments include a major quantitative leap in productivity, as well as diversification in the topics and paradigms followed, as well as more involvement in research from interpreter training programs. While such trends are altogether positive, two facts must be kept in mind:
Firstly, the complexity and variability of the phenomena making up interpreting make it necessary to conduct much more research, and in particular empirical research, with many replications, before findings can provide important applications to interpreter training and practice. The small size of the conference interpreting community, as well as a potential loss of impetus of conference interpreting as such, makes one wonder whether the necessary infrastructure will ever be provided, and some researchers involved in CIR are already turning to community interpreting and to other forms of interpreting for their research.
Secondly, research standards in conference interpreting still require major improvement. In this field, joint efforts with the field of Translation Studies, as it is now called, may help.
But above all these considerations, for individuals and institutional bodies who wish to contribute, CIR remains an interesting, wide-open field where there is much investigation space and much publication space, and newcomers should be welcome.
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