Bart Defrancq

Impoliteness in interpreting: A question of gender?

This is an exploratory inquiry into signed language interpreters’ perceptions of interpreter e-professionalism on social media, specifically Facebook. Given the global pervasiveness of Facebook, this study presents an international perspective, and reports on findings of focus groups held with a total of 12 professional signed language interpreters from the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and Denmark, all of whom are also Facebook users. The findings reveal that Facebook is seen to blur the traditional boundaries between personal and professional realms – an overlap which is perceived to be compounded by the nature of the small community in which signed language interpreters typically work –necessitating boundary management strategies in order to maintain perceptions of professionalism on the site. Facebook is considered a valuable professional resource to leverage for networking, professional development, problem solving and assignment preparation, but it is also perceived as a potential professional liability for both individual interpreters and the profession at large. Maintaining client confidentiality was found to be the most pressing challenge Facebook brings to the profession. Educational measures to raise awareness about e-professionalism were generally viewed favourably.The study probes into translation students’ perception of the value of online peer feedback in improving translation skills. Students enrolled in a translation degree in Australia translated a 250-word text on two separate occasions. On each occasion, the students were given another fellow student’s translation of the same text to mark and provide anonymous peer feedback. The original translations from all the students, together with any peer feedback, were uploaded onto an online forum. The students were encouraged to download their own translation to review the peer feedback in it. They were also encouraged to download and peruse other students’ peer reviewed translations for comparison. Upon completion of the project, the students were surveyed about their perceptions and appreciation of their engagement in the process in the following three capacities: (i) as a feedback provider, (ii) as a feedback recipient, and (iii) as a peruser of other students’ work and the peer feedback therein. Results suggest that translation students appreciate online peer feedback as a valuable activity that facilitates improvement. The students found receiving peer feedback on their own translation especially rewarding, as it offered alternative approaches and perspectives on tackling linguistic/translation issues. In comparing the three capacities, students perceived reviewing feedback on their own work and perusing other students’ work as more beneficial than engaging in giving feedback to others.Title: Tarjamat al-khadamaat al-’aammah ( Community Interpreting and Translation) Author: Dr. Mustapha Taibi (University of Western Sydney) Year of publication: 2011 Publisher: Dar Assalam , Rabat (Morocco) ISBN: 978-9954-22-088-7 191 pagesAccent is known to cause comprehension difficulty, but empirical interpreting studies on its specific impact have been sporadic. According to Mazzetti (1999), an accent is composed of deviated phonemics and prosody, both discussed extensively in the TESL discipline. The current study seeks to examine, in the interpreting setting, the applicability of Anderson-Hsieh, Johnson and Koehlers (1992) finding that deviated prosody hinders comprehension more than problematic phonemics and syllable structure do. Thirty-seven graduate-level interpreting majors, assigned randomly to four groups, rendered four versions of a text read by the same speaker and then filled out a questionnaire while playing back their own renditions. Renditions were later rated for accuracy by two freelance interpreters, whereas the questionnaires analysed qualitatively. Results of analyses indicated that 1) both phonemics and prosody deteriorated comprehension, but prosody had a greater impact; 2) deviated North American English post-vowel /r/, intonation and rhythm were comprehension problem triggers. The finding may be of use to interpreting trainers, trainees and professionals by contributing to their knowledge of accent.The title Conference of the Tongues at first sight raises questions as to the particularities of its pertinence to translation studies, i.e. the range of possible subject matters subsumed, and is somewhat loosely explained in the preface by a short and factual hint to its historical origins (in sixteenth-century Spain in a paratext to a translation of Aesop). There is no further elaboration on the motivation for the choice of this title however.The market for translation services provided by individuals is currently characterized by significant uncertainty because buyers lack clear ways to identify qualified providers from amongst the total pool of translators. Certification and educational diplomas both serve to reduce the resulting information asymmetry, but both suffer from potential drawbacks: translator training programs are currently oversupplying the market with graduates who may lack the specific skills needed in the market and no certification program enjoys universal recognition. In addition, the two may be seen as competing means of establishing qualification. The resulting situation, in which potential clients are uncertain about which signal to trust, is known as a signal jam . In order to overcome this jam and provide more consistent signaling, translator-training programs and professional associations offering certification need to collaborate more closely to harmonize their requirements and deliver continuing professional development (CPD) that help align the outcomes from training and certification.Interpreting is rather like scuba diving. With just a bit of protective equipment, we interpreters plunge for a short time into an often alien world, where a mistake can be very serious, not only for ourselves but for the other divers who are depending on us to understand their surroundings. And as all who dive, we interpreters find this daily foray into a new environment fascinating, exhilarating, but also at times, challenging. One of the high-risk dive sites into which we venture often is the sea of healthcare, where the strange whale-song of medical dialogue, the often incomprehensible behavior of local denizens such as doctors, and the tricky currents of the healthcare system itself require special knowledge and skill to navigate successfully. Did you ever wish for a dive manual for unique world of healthcare? Well, here’s a good one, from linguist, RN and interpreter trainer, Dr. Ineke Crezee of New Zealand.Among all the difficulties inherent in interpreting, numbers stand out as a common and complex problem trigger. This experimental study contributes to research on the causes of errors in the passive simultaneous interpretation (SI) of numbers. Two groups of Italian Master’s degree students (one for English and one for German) were asked to interpret simultaneously a number-dense speech from their respective B language into their mother tongue, Italian. Note-taking was allowed during the test and both the study participants and their lecturers completed a questionnaire afterwards. Data analysis was conducted with statistical and qualitative methods, combining the cognitivist and contextualist approach. The objective was to ascertain whether one main variable may be held responsible for the high error rate related to interpreting numbers and the difficulty perceived by students in the task. The analysis quantifies the relative impact of different causes of difficulties on participants’ delivery of numbers. It stresses the crucial role of the subjective variable represented by interpreters’ skills. Didactic implications and directions for future research are discussed in the conclusion.

Connective Items in Interpreting and Translation: Where Do They Come From?

This paper presents corpus-based research into the use of connective items (so, but, therefore,…) by English and Dutch translators and interpreters with a view to determining (1) the relationship with connective items in the French source text that translators and interpreters are faced with; (2) the similarities and differences between translations and interpretations with regard to connective items and the way they relate to the source text; (3) the extent to which translations favour written features and interpretation spoken features of the target languages. The corpus data used in this study is drawn from a recently compiled corpus of interpretations and translations carried out at the European Parliament. The research shows that the approaches taken by interpreters and translators differ substantially: interpreters, regardless of the language they interpret into, use a broader range of translation options, omit more than translators, but – surprisingly - also add more items. A qualitative study of the additions reveals that interpreters use connective items to make clausal relations explicit, but also to connect on-coming clauses after substantial omissions or when facing processing difficulties.

Nederlands in het perspectief van uitspraakverwerving en contrastieve taalkunde

Nederlands in het perspectief van uitspraakverwerving en contrastieve taalkunde, deel 2 van Lage Landen Studies, geeft een goed beeld van het type taalkundig onderzoek dat uitgevoerd wordt door Neerlandici uit binnen- en buitenland. Zoals de titel al aangeeft, kent de bundel twee grote themas. Aan de ene kant passeren recente ontwikkelingen in het onderzoek naar de uitspraak van het Nederlands als tweede/vreemde taal de revue. Ook het debat rond normativiteit en de huidige trends in het uitspraakonderwijs worden onder de loep genomen. Aan de andere kant staan recente theoretisch-methodologische aspecten van het contrastief taalonderzoek centraal en worden er nieuwe inzichten geleverd over de onderzochte talige fenomenen. Dit boek is dan ook van belang voor al wie geinteresseerd is in resultaten van onderzoek naar uitspraakverwerving en van contrastief taalkundig onderzoek, waarbij Nederlands een centrale rol speelt.

Building interpreting and intermodal corpora : a how-to for a formidable task

This contribution has a double aim. On the one hand, it highlights the various challenges and problems compilers of (simultaneous) interpreting and intermodal corpora are likely to face, and the solutions that were found and applied in three corpora of European Parliament plenary debates, i.e. EPIC, EPICG and EPTIC. On the other, it provides an accessible step-by-step guide for corpus developers who are working with European Parliament data, with the ultimate aim of bringing as far as possible into line the procedures used to transcribe the audio tracks, record metadata, annotate texts with part-of-speech and lemma information, perform text-to-text and text-to-audio/video alignment, and index the corpus for searching with appropriate corpus query tools. By adopting shared corpus building methods, it might be possible to leverage the substantial efforts already deployed by different research groups, and encourage others to take charge of new language pairs. This, we shall argue, might lead to a massively multilingual interpreting and intermodal corpus, through a distributed community effort.

Over-uh-Load, Filled Pauses in Compounds as a Signal of Cognitive Load

The aim of this chapter is to investigate cognitive load in interpreters on the basis of one particular type of filled pauses (‘uh(m)’), namely filled pauses occurring inside a compound lexeme. A Bakerian approach comparing interpreted and non-interpreted Dutch corpus data is adopted to single out the effect of interpreting. The corpus data for interpreting are drawn from EPICG; the non-mediated corpus data from CGN. The reported findings focus on different aspects of cognitive load. Interpreted Dutch contains significantly more intra-compound filled pauses than non-mediated Dutch speech. The increase is also stronger than the frequency increase of filled pauses overall, showing that compounds in particular generate cognitive overload. Secondly, higher cognitive load seems to hamper lexical access in interpreters. Filled pauses are indeed found to affect compounds with more frequent lexemes in interpreting than in non-mediated speech. Finally, cognitive load and the associated filled pauses appear to be related to cross-linguistic differences in the order of the component parts of compounds.

Corpus-based translation studies: Across genres, methods and disciplines

This paper provides an overview of state-of-the-art research in translation studies as represented in this special issue, with a special focus on corpus-based approaches that (re-)connect translation studies with other fields of corpus-based research in linguistics or which explore new types of translation data in the broadest possible sense of the term. It does so by singling out papers that illustrate different methods of data harvesting, on the one hand, particularly in areas that are currently underrepresented in the field, i.e. interpreting and subtitling, and by presenting studies that approach translation data from a perspective other than that of “translation universals”.

Relevance verbs in English and French: synonymy and its structural properties

Abstract This study deals with a particular group of predicates called “predicates/verbs of relevance” or “predicates/verbs of indifference” in the literature. Its purpose is to investigate to what extent verbs of this particular group present common structural properties. It therefore seeks to establish the structural manifestations of synonymy. These structural manifestations are not to be found in argument-function mapping à la Levin (1993), but rather in polarity, decategorialization and sentence structure. Corpus data reveal that syntax, semantics and pragmatics interact in particular ways in the field of relevance. This interaction appears to be grounded in pragmatic constraints arising from the principle of relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1986). The basic idea is that, as relevance is presupposed in human communication and need not be expressed, verbs of relevance are more likely to be used with negative than with positive polarity. Used with positive polarity, they tend to occur in sentence forms that present them as strongly presupposed. Used with negative polarity, they are more likely to occur in the focal area of the sentence. As statements about relevance express speakers points of view, relevance verbs are also markers of intersubjectivity and are therefore subject to grammaticalization phenomena, such as the omission of prepositions.

Contrastive verb valency and conceptual structures in the verbal lexicon

Abstract The CONTRAGRAM Contrastive Verb Valency Dictionary of Dutch, French and English not only describes interlingual differences between different types of verb complementation exhaustively, it also provides a semantic picture of the entry verbs. Next to a lexical approach to verb valency, a multidirectional and non-reductivist contrastive approach therefore offers a suitable basis for describing conceptual differences between various languages. These conceptual structures in the verbal lexicon are illustrated by means of a concrete contrastive lexicological analysis of the Dutch verb beslissen and its proto-translatious, French decider and English decide.