Earticle

Simultaneous interpretation is a way of interpretation that is performed under a strict time limit. During the simultaneous interpretation event, an interpreter must listen, remember, and speak concurrently, and convert Source Text to Target Text as soon as a speaker begins his or her speech. Difficulty doubles for simultaneous interpretation between languages that have different structure of information arrangement or language type; especially, translating Korean of SOV structure into Chinese of SVO structure aggravates the difficulty. In order to resolve it, emphasis is placed on using segmentation and anticipation; however, since Anticipation cannot be applied to all the sentences as a trump card, it is necessary to use other techniques complementarily. This paper supposed that repetition, simplification, and conversion are useful complements for Anticipation, and analyzed the sentential types to which the previously mentioned techniques may be applied in two Korean speeches.

This study attempts to propose a theoretical framework for an effective language acquisition facilitation model through the in-depth understanding and analysis of the processes involved in simultaneous interpretation. Interpretation is a special case of communication endeavors with interactions between various cognitive abilities and capacities. This study placed a special emphasis on the cognitive aspects of bilingual language processing as an aid to the understanding of simultaneous and comprehension and production of speeches in simultaneous interpreters. Efforts have been rendered to formulate an integrated second language acquisition models with information and insights gleaned from the analysis and review of the relevant models and theories in the areas of interpretation and second language acquisition studies.

This study attempts to explore specific cognitive processes involved in simultaneous interpretation with particular emphasis on the working memory and the development of intuition. Recent studies on simultaneous interpretation were extensively analyzed and it was found that transformations rather than simultaneity during the interpretation processes pose more difficulties to the interpreters. Research on bilingual acquisition was reviewed in order to better understand the psycholinguistic characteristics involved in the interpretation. Based on the review of the working memory and its interactions with cerebellum, a new model on the relationship between working memory and simultaneous interpretation was introduced. Finally, theories on the development of intuition were reviewed with a suggestion of further studies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how to evaluate simultaneous interpretation. The first step was to look at what is meant by evaluation especially within the setting of a university/graduate school. Tyler's rationale which is often cited in curriculum studies was applied to the field of interpretation. The second step was to define simultaneous interpretation, followed by a review of what clients expect from conference interpreters. To facilitate the process, a user's expectation survey conducted by the AIIC was used. The last step was to look at what is meant by evaluation simultaneous interpretation for interpreter-trainees and professional interpreters. In the case of interpreter-trainees, the classroom setting gives the student ample feedback, but once the interpreter-trainee becomes a full-fledged professional interpreter, it is up to the interpreter to make sure that she monitors herself on a consistent basis.

Though anticipation is often talked about as a simultaneous interpretation (SI) strategy, it is an everyday occurrence among monolingual speakers who dialogue within a given context. Since anticipation is used effortlessly in normal conversation, the purpose of this study is to determine whether anticipation is used effortlessly in simultaneous interpretation as well or whether it should and needs to be taught as a separate SI strategy. In Korean into English simultaneous interpretation, because the verb comes at the very end of the sentence, it is important to fully understand the context and anticipate the thought direction in which the speaker is moving. Two cloze tests – one in Korean and one in English - will be conducted on students who have just begun SI. For the comparison, a group of students in the second year and another in the first year will be given the same cloze tests. Then, the SI students will take part in an experiment using two texts to determine when and how students anticipate.

This study attempts to explore the roles and nature of creativity in interpretation process with pedagogical implications. One of the most crucial aspects of the creativity is problem solving capability and this paper looked into how creative problem solving capability is defined and implemented in the context of simultaneous interpretation. The study particularly reviews the unique roles intuition plays in the development of creativity. The paper found that insights are very important in enhancing and maintaining creativity and intuition can stimulate and reinforce the insights. Also suggested was the fact that the development stages of intuition are commensurate with the development sequences of creativity in problem solving. Recommendations for further studies are included.

The study investigates whether there is a difference in the numbers and the types of errors students make when they interpret from their A into the B language compared to when interpreting from their B into the A language. The participants in this study were nine secondsemester interpretation students of the Korean-English Program at a Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation. The same students were tested interpreting in both directions. Three categories of error were used for analyzing their interpretation performances: Meaning, Language use, and Presentation. The study results show that the students made more Meaning-related errors when working from B into A, and more Language and Presentation-related errors when working from A into the B language.

Dans la deuxième moitie du 20ème siècle, l’anglais est devenu la langue de conférence la plus répandue. Dans les réunions internationales conduites en anglais, la plupart des participants sont des locuteurs non natifs dont le lexique, la syntaxe et l’élocution diffèrent de l’anglais standard. Ils sont par conséquent souvent difficiles à comprendre et à interpréter. Cette étude, réalisée par Elvira Basel (2002) dans le cadre de sa thèse de doctorat, dirigée par le premier auteur, examine la question de savoir si la connaissance de la langue maternelle du locuteur aide les interprètes a la restitution plus complète de la densité d’information dans leur interprétation.

There is a common misunderstanding in the translation market that simultaneous interpretation is more difficult than consecutive interpretation, thus the former one is superior to the latter. The majority of existing research concentrates on English‐oriented interpretation with single material. Chinese‐Japanese language pairs have been rarely studied. Against this backdrop, this thesis aims to compare the completeness rates between Japanese‐Chinese simultaneous interpreting and consecutive interpreting of student interpreters by analyzing three separate cases studies. The three cases presented in this thesis are extracted from public speeches in the website of the Japan National Press Club, and fall into three categories in terms of the feature of original speech, speech pace, and information density. Nineteen student interpreters are divided into CS and SC group, and interpret different parts of the speeches consecutively or simultaneously. Comparisons are made between the same interpreter with different but same‐level materials, and different interpreters with the same material.

Much research on the quality assessment of simultaneous interpretation have been carried out by interpreters in the past and nowadays increasingly by end-users. This paper demonstrates how professional interpreters asses the quality of the pivot in relay interpretation settings in Korea where relay interpretation is commonly used in multilingual conferences since most interpreters usually have only two working languages. This paper also contains a survey that explores the quality assessment criteria set by professional interpreters suggesting a difference in criteria between simultaneous interpretation and relay interpretation.

This study explores the causes of prolonged in-sentence pauses in English into Korean simultaneous interpretation. Pauses are one of the most tangible indexes that show the efficiency of interpreters’ information processing. Since professional interpreters instinctively try to avoid long pauses in their simultaneous interpretation, prolonged in-sentence pauses in their interpretation demonstrate their processing is suffering for unknown reasons. A computer-aided analysis of English into Korean simultaneous interpretation on TV showed that most of the long in-sentence pauses were located in the first half of the interpreted Korean sentences. Original English sentences that resulted in prolonged in-sentence pauses in interpretation were syntactically more complex than those that produced no long pause sentences. The EVS/length of English sentence ratios also demonstrated that interpreters began their interpretation too early for long and complex English sentences. The results reveal that the main cause of the prolonged pauses in interpretation is impaired understanding of incoming English sentence by the interpreter. Recommendations for avoiding these pauses included adjusting EVS according to the length of original incoming sentence and producing several short target sentences instead of long ones with prolonged in-sentence pauses.

This study aims to identify what professional interpreters would do when they face the risk of fluctuations in speech rate in simultaneous interpretation. In order to investigate it, the study first proposed the method of calculating the speech rate, information density as well as the percentage of interpretation. Then, it gathered research materials which can be classified into two types, one is speakers speaking with text and the other is impromptu speech. On top of that, the study analyzed how the speech rate, information density and speech pattern of speakers affected the percentage of interpretation, and what the most suitable new information is for professional interpreters.

This article examined an English into Korean simultaneous interpretationin a TV studio by a non-professional interpreter to cover the AsianaAirlines San Francisco airport accident on July 6, 2013. A computeraided analysis of the temporal aspects of the interpretation revealed thatthe interpreter who was found to be a reporter working for theinternational division of the TV station demonstrated statistically higherspeech proportion and SPM than the speaker at sentence level whileleaving exceptionally long EVS and TTS. On the other hand, sheomitted a significant portion of the original speech in her interpretation. As a result, the interpretation ended up being consecutive interpretationrather than simultaneous interpretation as she faithfully covered onesentence at a cost of incoming several sentences. This clearly shows thereporter failed to distribute her information processing capacity toseveral sub modules involved in simultaneous interpretation as shemight not have undertaken the necessary training. Although sitting inthe studio without a headphone to block noise and interference from herown voice might be partly attributable to the poor interpretation, thisbasically attests that simultaneous interpretation should be carried outby professional interpreters who underwent the training of listening andspeaking concurrently and maintain subtle balance among competingefforts.

This study is an attempt to understand the cognitive aspects of simultaneous interpretation with insights from findings in bilingual processing research. Several studies on bilingual development and its impact on psycholinguistic implications were reviewed in efforts to better comprehend the cognitive features and operations involved in the smooth and successful performance of the simultaneous interpretation. The ideas and insights obtained from various studies on bilingual development and its cognitive underpinnings are expected to help to provide better understanding of simultaneous interpretation processes for ultimate formulation of adequate pedagogical methods for future interpreters.

This study explores the way simultaneous interpretation is portrayed in Korean news media. Simultaneous interpretation is a complex task requiring an interpreter to master the skills of listening, production, and memory skills which need to be operated simultaneously facilitated by the right coordination skills(Gile, 2009). Thus it requires expertise, and interpreters who are well trained and, consequently, competent in both consecutive and simultaneous interpreting are called ‘conference interpreters.’ Conference interpreters are covered frequently in newspaper articles and are often called ‘simultaneous interpreters’ in Korean media. Conference interpreters are recognized as experts in the field. However recently, the words ‘simultaneous interpretation’ and ‘simultaneous interpreters’ are often used inappropriately: ‘simultaneous interpretation’ is used to describe a celebrity’s language competency; ‘simultaneous interpreter’ is often used to add glamour to a celebrity’s career profile or lifestyle; ‘simultaneous interpretation’ is also often used in names for language services provided for the general public, which requires consecutive interpretation at best. This study explores how the media uses and tweaks the concept of simultaneous interpretation and discusses implications of such misuse.

One of the conmon misconceptions about language is that the spoken and written forms of a language are the same or one is merely a more casual or informal version of the other. As Halliday noted, however, speech and writing are two rather different ways of representing our experience. The distinction between the two have become blurred only as a consequence of modern technology. Spoken language is no less highly organized than written language and shows the following characteristics: lower lexical density, simpler sentence structure, prosodic features, etc. This study purports that attention be given to the characteristics of the spoken language in the translation process of a text that is to be delivered in the spoken form. Such attention will ensure that translation is better suited for the understanding of the listener in terms of acceptability and readability. A comparative analysis of the simultaneous interpretation and the translation of the same texts is carried out to investigate how the characteristics of written and spoken languages are manifested differently in the two versions. Compared to the translation, the simultaneous interpretation contained more words and sentences than the source text. Also, lexical density of simultaneous interpretation was much lower than the translation. However, the amount of information in the two versions were similar.

Simultaneous interpretation is an extremely complex cognitive task: an interpreter receives an auditory message in the source language, simultaneously reformulates and produces it in the target language. Additionally, language switching from comprehension to production and vice versa always occurs during translation , and inhibitory control is required to avoid interference between the two active languages. In this paper, first I summarize previous bilinguals' neuroimaging studies on selection, inhibition, and switching between two languages, which are essential processings of simultaneous interpretation. Then, I will review recent neuroimaging studies on how the brain works during simultaneous interpretation together with an fMRI study I conducted with my colleagues to examine the extent to which the long-term experience of being a simultaneous interpreter changes brain functions. Finally, I will discuss how language proficiency and experience of simultaneous interpretation influence brain mechanism during interpretation.

This study examines the impact of features of Chinese English on simultaneous interpretation into Korean based on information structure analysis. A simultaneous interpreting experiment was conducted on 10 professional interpreters over two phases. First, participants conducted a Simultaneous Interpreting task. After the SI task was completed, participants received a transcript of the source text and underlined segments of source text that were difficult to perceive or understand due to phonological and/or grammatical features of Chinese English. The result of the experiment revealed that both phonological and grammatical features of Chinese English imposed interpreting difficulties for participants, and specifically, the difficulties that they experienced were concentrated on new information rather than old information. The result is supported by both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the source text, underlined transcripts and target texts.

One of the most important strategic elements for interpretation learners in increasing the efficiency of their performance is the acquisition of a number of interpretation learning strategies. The strategies involve such issues as: how to process information with complete meanings, change word orders, filter out irrelevant data, share knowledge and information with conference participants, divide complicated sentences into shorter and more easily comprehensible phrases, accumulate necessary knowledge and gather information about the speakers together with the issues of Latin American nations repeatedly raised in conferences, such as the major demands of Latin American countries toward developed nations. It is important for learners to be familiar with the fretuent usages of specific terms. In the General Assembly of the United Nations, for example, the following verbs have been used by most heads of state and representatives: apoyar, desear aspirar, pedir, exigir, proponer, necesitar, alegrar, deber, celebrar, congratular, saludar, and acoger. Korean-Spanish simultaneous interpretation also requires students to be exposed to different kinds of pronunciations pertinent to each Latin American country because in Korea, it is difficult to find opportunities to talk to native speakers and listen to their pronunciations. In the meantime, learners who grew up abroad and only recently came to Korea need to refine their Korean, focusing on analyzing Chinese characters used in Korea and practicing Korea traditional expressions. Learning how to interpret numbers is another important task, together with processing speaker's non-grammatical phrases.