Earticle

La prédominance de l'interprétation consécutive à base de notes, développée et utilisée par la première génération d'interprètes de la Ligue des Nations en vue des longs discours prononcés à la tribune a été cruciale pour la professionalistion de l'interprétariat au 20e siècle. Cependant, ce mode a perdu sa prédominance face à l'interprétation simultanée assistée par la technologie. Suite à l'essort d'appareils d'enregistrement numérique au format de poche, la technique classique de l'interprétation consécutive doit peut être faire face à son plus grand défi. En effet, la combinaison entre la mémoire de l'interprète et ses notes est remplacée par un fichier audio qui sert de base à une interprétation simultanée rendue une fois que l'intervention source a été rendue. Lancé par l'interprète du SCIC, Michèle Ferrari en 2001, cette innovation technologique soulève un certain nombre de questions pour les practiciens et les chercheurs. Certaines questions ont été traitées à l'occasion de test initiaux. L'étude décrit ce nouveau mode hybride d'interprétation au vu de sa conception et des répercussion au niveau de la communication. De plus, l'article présente un projet de recherche de faible envergure conçu pour évaluer l'efficacité de cette technique. Sont également décrit l'équipement utilisé ainsi que le retour d'informaton de la part des interprètes professionnels ayant testé cette technique. Au vu des résultats de travaux sur le terrain menés à Bruxelles, cette étude se concentre sur la réception du rendu consécutif (simultané) perçu par le public.

Les exercices de résumé sont utlisés durant l’apprentissange des techniques d’interprétation consecutive, mais rares sont les études empiriques sur l’efficacité de cette méthode. Un groupe témoin et un groupe expérimental sont composés pour tester l’efficacité de ces exercices. Le groupe témoin, qui ont fait moins d’exercices de resumés était moins performant que le groupe experimental. Cependant, la différence statistique était trop insignifiante pour pouvoir trancher. Pourtant cette étude pourrait être utilisé comme catalyseur pour encourager les recherches empiriques sur l’enseignement de la consécutive.

The choice of language in note-taking for consecutive interpreting has been a focus of interest for many researchers. Regarding what factors may influence the interpreter’s choice of language, several variables have been suggested in the literature, including the source language (SL) vs. target language (TL) distinction, the A and B language distinction, characteristics of the languages involved, and levels of expertise. The present study examined how these factors may be related to language choices in note-taking for consecutive interpreting that involve Korean and English. Ten first-year students, ten second-year students, and three professional interpreters participated in the study to produce notes in both directions. The analysis of the notes suggests that the participants preferred to take notes in the source language (also A language) when interpreting from Korean to English. In the other direction, less experienced interpreters tended to fluctuate between taking notes in SL and TL (A language), but more experienced interpreters were found to prefer to take notes in SL (B language). Detailed findings and their implications are discussed.

Although dialects of a single language could distinctly differ from each other, including their common language, very little is known about interpreters’ comprehensibility of a dialect and the accuracy of interpreting performance of which source language is in the dialect. This paper reports on the findings of an investigation that explored the accuracy of a consecutive interpreting performance from the Jeju dialect that was performed by Jeju dialect speaking interpreters and non-Jeju dialect interpreters. By using a meaning unit-based quality assessment, the accuracy of interpreting performances between the two groups were compared. The results show that the non-Jeju dialect speaking interpreters’ performances were significantly inaccurate with the majority of the information in the source text either being omitted or distorted whereas Jeju dialect speaking interpreters’ performances achieved acceptable accuracy. The incomprehensibility of Jeju dialect seems to be attributed to the inaccurate performances of the non-Jeju dialect speaking interpreters, largely due to unfamiliar words. Although both groups used the same strategy (omissions and making inferences) to cope with incomprehension issues, the effectiveness of the strategies was limited because non-Jeju dialect speaking interpreters were confused by the unique phonetic, morphologic, and lexical features of the dialect.

As fluency is considered an important part of interpreting quality, it is important for interpreters to be able to control pauses and hesitations. In this context, this study investigated patterns of pauses and motivations for pauses in consecutive interpreting into Korean and English. In the study, ten first-year students in a graduate program of interpretation and translation performed consecutive interpreting in both directions and participated in retrospective interviews to comment on reasons for pauses in their performance. The findings suggest that there were more occurrences of pauses in unnatural places in interpreting into English than the other direction. As for the motivations for pauses, in the K-E direction, linguistic difficulties, such as searching for appropriate expressions in English and restructuring target language outputs, were most frequently cited by the participants. In the E-K direction, not only linguistic factors but also extra-linguistic factors, including note-reading and checking for logical flows, caused the participants to pause and hesitate during interpreting. The paper discusses major findings and their pedagogical implications.

Notetaking is a useful skill that assists an interpreter with their memory in consecutive interpreting. However, the useful tool may pose a major obstacle to interpreter trainees. There is a considerable amount of research available that provides general knowledge and specific examples of what and how to note (Lee 2013, Gillies 2017). Yet, the research does not seem to provide enough resources in support of notetaking; and some researchers even suggest employing the task is mostly personal preference (Choi 1998/2004: 91, Jones 1998/2002). This noticeable divide in perspective and lack of explicit illustrations posit a need for additional exploration on the topic. Particularly, meaning – not words – is paramount in taking notes (Choi 1998/2004: 82), which should be specifically presented in a systematic manner. Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) prioritizes “meaning” in analyzing language. The purpose for this study is to provide trainees with a method of notetaking using SFL. The study has two parts: one is to create a notetaking strategy employing SFL’s meaning-based classification of verbs; the second part is to validate the theory by analyzing trainees’ test results. In SFL, verbs are considered the key constituent in a clause (Butt et al. 2000) and, in English, they are categorized into six groups (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014). These six groups are the basis from which the criteria and guidelines for writing verbs are derived. Part one of this study explores using SFL’s verb classification in notetaking.

Understanding features of self-repairs is critical to the exploration of interpreters’ underlying self-monitoring mechanism. As most previous taxonomies just made slight amendments on Levelt’s tripartite taxonomy model — which is designed for monolingual speech production, they failed to match features of interpreting output. In order to resolve the defects of previous classifications, the present paper established an interpreting-tailored taxonomy of self-repairs, which categorized repairs into five major types with altogether nine sub-types. Rather than directly referring to Levelt’s model, each category in the new taxonomy is derived from the descriptive study of data collected from ten interpreting trainees, including their interpreting recordings, retrospection and notes. The qualitative analysis on distribution of each repair category also shows that trainees’ adoption of repairs is mainly triggered by competence deficiency rather than the attempt to facilitate communication.

Fluency management is a persistent challenge in interpreter training, particularly when students work into a B language. This study investigates how syntactic complexity in the target text (TT) affects disfluency in Korean-to-English consecutive interpreting by student interpreters. While previous research has examined cognitive load and general fluency, few studies have explored TT sentence complexity as a predictor of disfluency patterns. Drawing on data fromsix student interpreters, this study analyses disfluency frequency and type across sentences classified by Mean Dependency Distance (MDD). The findings show that TT syntactic complexity is positively associated with overall disfluency, with silent pauses most consistently affected, followed by fillers and self-repairs, while repetitions showed no reliable pattern. This relationship was confirmed through both linear and non-parametric analyses, revealing how specific disfluency types reflect structural processing strain. By focusing on a typologically distant language pair and analysing disfluency at the sentence level, the study adds empirical depth to fluency research in interpreting. It also offers pedagogical implications for helping trainees manage TT complexity more strategically during B language production.

This paper aims to identify the sub-competences needed for consecutive interpreting in various communication conditions and develop an appropriate training model for strengthening the strategic sub-competence. For this, sub-competences including the strategic sub-competence for consecutive interpreting were defined. Considering that the strategic sub-competence covers situation analysis, problem solving as well as coordinating all the other sub-competences according to communication conditions, specific consecutive interpreting conditions were identified and classified. In addition, domestic consecutive interpreting demand for the past two years was collected and expert interviews were conducted to identify the specific condition factors worth covering in order to develop an effective and efficient training model. A model composed of three types of distinct conditions was developed and applied. Surveys conducted after each application reveal that the training model is effective in making students more conscious about different interpreting conditions and in developing their strategic competence.

This paper deals with notetaking skills which are key elements of consecutive interpreting performance and reports findings from a pilot study on interpreters’ consecutive interpreting with notes. With a view to contributing to consecutive interpreting training, this paper discusses basic principles in notetaking and some effective notetaking skills that may contribute to the enhancement ofinterpreting performance. The pilot study examines five interpreters’ consecutive interpreting performances and their notes taken with a Smartpen. The findings suggest three types of efficient notetaking skills. First, interpreters need to adopt dynamic notetaking. Dynamic notetaking refers to taking additional notes swiftly not necessarily following the left-to-right and top-down movement, storing temporarily key information in their working memory while catching up with the source text. Second, interpreters need to take a note of the syntactic structure of the source text in order to effectively reproduce a complicated or convoluted sentence. Third, interpreters need to use symbols in a consistent manner in order to avoid confusion and misinterpretation. Just as the use of a Smartpen enabled the researchers to analyse the subjects’ notetaking in real time, the Smartpen is expected to be a useful tool for teaching and training notetaking skills. Given the limitations of research methodology, it would be worthwhile to examine if training these skills leads to the enhancement of consecutive interpreting performance through a large scale experimental study.

This case study conducts an analysis on the types of self-initiated self-repairs in consecutive interpreting into German by students who speak Korean as their mother tongue. The analysis introduces the attributes of CI and presents an overview of existing studies on self-repair in L1- and L2-research as well as in the field of translation. A corpus comprised of interpretations (Korean to German) delivered by eight students was recorded at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies to be examined for occurrences of self-repair, among which a total of 343 cases of repair were analyzed in depth. The findings of the current study forms the basis for sub-categorizing self-repairs into overt repairs and covert repairs. The overt repairs were broken down into supplementing and replacement, and the covert repairs into pauses, repetitions and elongations. In addition to the categorization of self-initiated self-repairs, the study demonstrates that the frequency of covert repairs was six times higher than that of overt repairs, implying that priority was given to accuracy over fluency. The research results can be used to assist the students in using self-repairs as a strategy to increase fluency.

Fluency is commonly accepted as a reference criterion in assessing interpreter’s interpreting competence. Based on a taxonomy of three components, i. e. ungrammatical pauses, repeats and repairs ,this paper presents a quantitative analysis of trainee interpreters’ output. The results show the significant and directional impact on their production of disfluencies that happened on the repeats, but there is not significant directional impact on the pauses and repairs. Even though the study tackles the issue at hand, it fails to generate unanimous evidence to corroborate the hypothesis that output is more fluent in interpreter’s mother tongue than in the foreign language.

With the increase in the English literacy of Koreans, more and more Koreans have become sensitive to unnatural Korean sentences in translation that mimic the linguistic features of English. This increased sensitivity has activated research on so-called translationese, "awkwardness or ungrammaticality of translation". However, most of the research until now has been constrained to translation whereas interpreting, the oral translation activity, has not been in the limelight. Therefore, this study aims to identify reasons for unnatural sentences generated in English-Korean consecutive interpreting and propose corresponding interpreting strategies to make the interpreting output sound more natural to Koreans. The reasons for translationese would vary, but this study will take the linguistic typological view to construe the phenomenon, especially focusing on the verb orientation of Korean and the noun orientation of English.

This paper attempts to bring attention to contributions that text analysis may provide for improving students’ performance in an accreditation test. The paper takes an example of the Australian interpreting accreditation system, one of the exemplary accreditation institutions in the world (Hale et al., 2012: 10). The Australian case may be of use to the Korean interpreting circles that have had an increased interest in recent years in adopting its own interpreting accreditation system (e.g. Park 2016). Of all the different contributors that help determine success in the test, including language ability and cognitive efficiency, text analysis seems to also have a significant role to play in increasing students’ chance of success in the test. As a theoretical framework, this paper uses Systemic Functional Linguistics’ method of thematic development and grammatical metaphor. The main data includes two English source texts and eight students’ consecutive interpreting of those texts. The students’ interpreting was drawn from recordings and notes taken during their accreditation exams. The findings of the analysis show that, while successful test-takers handled zig-zag patterns and grammatical metaphors without serious issues, unsuccessful students missed, deleted and/or mistranslated the aforementioned elements that affected the comprehensive interpretation.