Università degli Studi di Trieste Dipartimento di scienze del linguaggio dell'interpretazione e della traduzione Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpreti e Traduttori THE INTERPRETERS' NEWSLETTER Number 12 2003 E. U. T. The Interpreters' Newsletter Dipartimento di Scienze del Linguaggio dell'Interpretazione e della Traduzione Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpreti e Traduttori Università degli Studi di Trieste Via F. Filzi, 14 34132 Trieste (Italy) General Editors Alessandra RICCARDI Maurizio VIEZZI Consultant Editors Mark BRADY David KATAN Cristina PALAZZI David SNELLING Christopher TAYLOR Laila WADIA With acknowledgments to Alberto SEVERI (Lay-out) © 2003 Dipartimento di Scienze del Linguaggio dell'Interpretazione e della Traduzione Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpreti e Traduttori Università degli Studi di Trieste Edizioni Università di Trieste - via F. Filzi 14 34132 Trieste - Tel. (39) 0405582345 - Fax (39) 0405582301 In copertina: Burano, foto di Alberto Severi CONTENTS Editorial Alessandra Riccardi and Maurizio Viezzi V Second-hand emotion: interpreting attitudes Anne Marie Bülow Møller 1 Effects of presentation rate on working memory in simultaneous interpreting Miriam Shlesinger 37 Physiological stress during simultaneous interpreting: a comparison of experts and novices Ingrid Kurz 51 The relation between ST delivery rate and quality in simultaneous interpretation Sonia Pio 69 Strategies adopted by student interpreters in SI: a comparison between the English-Italian and the German-Italian language-pairs Valentina Donato 101 Norms and quality in media interpreting: the case of Formula One press conferences Francesco Straniero Sergio 135 Les marqueurs de cohérence en interprétation consécutive Georges Bastin 175 The training of blind students at the SSLMIT - Trieste Cynthia Jane Kellett Bidoli 189 L'enseignement de l'I.C. aux étudiants non-voyants Maria Cristina Palazzi 201 Community interpreting: re-conciliation through power management Raffaela Merlini - Roberta Favaron 205 IV Contents Simultaneous conference interpreting in the Turkish printed and electronic media 1988-2003 Emru Diriker 231 EDITORIAL This issue of The Interpreters' Newsletter comes out later than planned. Unfortunately, university education and research rank very low in the Italian government's priorities with inevitable consequences in terms of funding. We have managed to overcome our financial difficulties, though, and this is good news. As is the fact that this issue features ten papers, most of which are based on empirical-experimental studies, covering a wide range of topics – from physiology to media interpreting, from community interpreting to training. Anne Marie Bülow-Møller investigates interpreters' transfer strategies in conveying speakers' emotions and concentrates on aspects such as the transfer of semantically charged items, rhythmically marked negative intensifiers, characteristic prosodic patterns, internal quotations. A comparison of ten experienced interpreters' renderings of speeches with affect cues in both vocabulary and prosody shows that interpreters do indeed pay attention to emotive cues, there is some selection in the kind of affect conveyed and emotive prosody is the major source of difficulty in comprehension. Miriam Shlesinger's study examines the rapid forgetting process entailed by SI when strings of unrelated or loosely contextualised items (e.g. names, numbers etc.) appear in the source text. Lists of such items were used as a means to examine the extent of information loss, arguably attributable to working memory limits and the impossibility of rehearsing during SI. The experimental design centered on professionals' capacity to retain long left- branching noun phrases while interpreting into a head-initial language as well as on the role of the presentation rate. Ingrid Kurz presents a pilot study carried out at the University of Vienna in order to assess the stressfulness of SI. Experienced interpreters differ from student interpreters in that SI has become a routine situation and training and experience are conducive to choosing the appropriate strategies. The study is based on the hypothesis that the higher psychological stress experienced by student interpreters will be reflected in elevated physiological parameters. In order to test this hypothesis and evaluate stress responses, two physiological parameters, namely pulse rate and skin conductance level, were measured. Sonia Pio investigates the relationship between ST delivery rate and quality in SI and in particular the potentially negative effect a fast ST may have on a SI performance in terms of both ST-TT equivalence and TT delivery. A group of professional interpreters and a group of students took part in the study and were asked to interpret in the simultaneous mode one "fast" and one "slow" ST. Categories used to evaluate equivalence were omissions, substitutions, additions VI Editorial and logical/time sequence deviations, whereas SI fluency was assessed on the basis of pronunciation/phonation errors, filled or unfilled pauses, repetitions, corrections and false starts. Valentina Donato's paper considers whether and to what extent the language pair involved in the interpreting process may have an impact on the choice of SI strategies. The German and English versions of a Swedish text were interpreted simultaneously into Italian by 10+10 student interpreters; the TTs were then analysed with particular reference to comprehension strategies, reformulation strategies and emergency strategies. Significant differences between the two groups were observed with regard to anticipation, time lag, morphosyntactic transformations and transcoding. Francesco Straniero Sergio draws on his very extensive corpus to discuss quality in media interpreting with particular reference to interpreted press conferences broadcast at the end of every Formula One Grand Prix. The analysis clearly shows that quality requirements in media interpreting are essentially different from those generally found in conference interpreting, appropriate production of form rather than accurate re-production of content often being the key to a successful performance. Georges Bastin moves from the analysis of a small corpus of consecutive interpreting exams to stress the importance of coherence markers in note-taking and target text production. Coherence is seen as a necessary and sometimes even sufficient element in evaluating a student's performance and a series of conclusions are drawn with a view to training. Cynthia Jane Kellett Bidoli and Maria Cristina Palazzi present two separate papers on the same topic, namely the training of blind students, and discuss some of the specific problems teachers and students are confronted with. The two papers seem to suggest that while problems do indeed exist, their solution is above all a matter of organization and flexibility. Raffaela Merlini's paper deals with community interpreting and takes a corpus of interpreter-mediated encounters in a medical setting as a starting point for a discussion of the interpreter's role in managing power relations. As the demand for community interpreting services is on the increase, Merlini's paper is a most welcome contribution to a field where research could profitably be intensified. Finally, Emru Diriker reports on how the interpreting profession is covered by the Turkish media and underlines that interpreters are mentioned, if at all, as they are believed to make big money and big mistakes. Which, after all, is a curious way to look at a profession. We hope you will enjoy this issue. AR & MV SECOND-HAND EMOTION: INTERPRETING ATTITUDES Anne Marie Bülow-Møller Copenhagen Business School, Denmark One of the reasons politicians are loath to make speeches through interpreters is that they are afraid to lose their emotional impact. Evidently effects like credibility and conviction are also carried by the semantic contents, but in political communication in particular the speaker's tone and whole attitude are inextricably linked with the message. One member of the European Parliament is on record as saying that she speaks her mother tongue with interpretation if she wants to make sure of her facts, and her best English if she needs to "get across" as a person (Lone Dybkjær, personal communication). The feeling is probably widespread; whether this is actually a good idea is of course a completely different issue. The need to "get across" is clearly felt in exchanges with question-answer sequences in front of an audience, where information is not necessarily the prime consideration. Where duels are lost and won in terms of credible and convincing suasion, the demonstration of an attitude is an important supplement to the demonstration of competence. This poses a problem for conference interpreters: they are drilled to convey the speaker's information smoothly, but they cannot possibly play-act each speaker's complete set of voice-reflected attitudes. What they do, if their temperament allows it, is produce some sort of gesture towards the affect they perceive, as if to let their voice slip in a cue for the audience to indicate that the speaker is making use of emotive features. This study sets out to examine possible patterns and hierarchies in the selection of features that are passed on to the audience to reflect affect. It will be argued that, contrary to expectation, blatant demonstrations of affect do not necessarily receive priority treatment in transfer, possibly because of