Simultaneous Interpretation: A Hypothetical Model and its Practical Application

Abstract

At the outset it is essential that the use to which several important and recurring terms will be put be made explicit. The first of these is "interpreter". Probably the most common understanding of this term is as a somewhat shortened version of the phrase "conference interpreter". Seleskovitch (1976: 97) places the number of conference interpreters in the Western world at a maximum of a few thousand, of whom something over one thousand are members of the Inter-national Association of Conference Interpreters AIIC. Seleskovitch argues both directly and by example that the act of inter-preting is engaged in by others who could not be considered conference interpre-ters, and that this broader activity is the basis for 'universal interest' in the phen-omenon. One of my informants, an AIIC member and teacher of interpreters, agreed that only a small portion of interpretation is conference interpretation, and extended the concept of interpretation to include monolingual activity. As an example of monolingual interpretation this informant described the retelling of a film, lecture, or television program by someone who had been present to another who had missed the event. He also suggested that the parent commonly engages in monolingual interpretation in talking to his or her children; reformulating adult conceptions into a speech act comprehensible to the youngsters. Each of these acts begins with a message, or meaning, available to one party in the in-teraction but to which the other party is, in his phrase, "temporarily deaf". But the original message is not merely replayed, as with a tape recorder. Rather it is reformulated and retransmitted (accurately, if the interpreter is a good one), but in a manner that is different from the original precisely in those ways which make it understandable to the listener. These interpretive acts differ from those engaged in by conference interpreters, in this informant's view, largely because they do not "accidentally pass through another language". 217