Although interpretation studies can be considered as a relatively new discipline, there seems to be a consensus among interpreters and interpreter trainers concern
ing the description of the interpreting process.
The communication-information model created by Danica Seleskovitch as ear
ly as 1975, was based on three kinds of participants: message originator (speaker), message mediator (interpreter), and message receiver (target-language audience).
‘Message’ (sens du message) is the key concept: instead of mere words, the inter
preter is expected to translate the sense of what was said, and by processing the informative-cognitive content, create the effect as it was intended by the speaker.
In the years that followed, several major contributions were made to this model, by drawing on the latest findings of cognitive psychology, neurolinguistics, seman
tics, psycholinguistics etc. However, it is still not known what happens in the ‘black box’ of the interpreters’ brain, after receiving the input in SL and before producing the output in TL. Some findings suggest that ‘meaning’ cannot be stored without linguistic structure, and the latter may have a bigger role in retention and recall (Isham 1994) than it had been thought previously. The fact remains, however, that information given by a SL speaker has to be processed by the interpreter in order to be understood and transmitted.
Listening is the most crucial part of the interpreting process: without effective listening no interpretation would be possible. According to Ralph G. Nichols’ find
ings in 1957, however, the average white-collar worker demonstrates only about 25%
percent listening efficiency. Interpreter students, who are highly motivated people, can perform only slightly better at the beginning of their training, as born out by various listening and chain-translation tests. Of course, their results will improve considerably when they become aware that they are being tested, and begin to fo
cus their attention. Even so, their listening efficiency will remain relatively low.
At the beginning of each course, students of the Training Centre for Translators and Interpreters (TCTI, ELTE University,Budapest) participate in the chain trans
lation of an informative speech or a story. The prerecorded text is not longer than 5-6 minutes, and either contains some well-organised, detailed information or a well-defined story-line that would make it relatively easy to anticipate the rest of the passage. There is always an unexpected twist (or several twists) that would up
set students’ expectations: e.g. breaking cliches or familiar patterns, an unexpected or unreasonable turn of events, unorthodox solutions, well-known tales with an unusual ending. (The texts can be adapted for this purpose, but there are some
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that can be used in their original form: e.g. Thurber’s Fables are excellently suited for this test). Students take turns in listening to the latest version of the story once, on their own, and recording their own interpretation in the other language, which is to be listened to and interpreted by the next student. The passage would be in
terpreted into A and B languages alternately, at least 8 times. Comparing the final version to the original and analyzing how the content became distorted, calls stu
dents’ attention to poor listening habits and the problem of presuppositions. It is interesting to note that results were hardly better when the passages were repeat
edly recalled in the same (A) language, which shows that the problems encoun
tered were due to listening rather than linguistic deficiencies.
Untrained listeners are often not aware that effective listening takes a lot of effort and it is only to some extent an automatic process. As thinking (listening) is approximately four times faster than speaking, active listeners can use the remain
ing time for the processing of the received information. If listeners fail to capitalize on the differential between speech speed and thought speed, listening efficiency will remain low. A. Wolvin and C. G. Coakley (1982) define listening as “the process of receiving, attending to, and assigning meaning to aural stimuli’’. All stimuli that are not processed (attended to and meaning assigned to them), will perish after a few seconds.
Kahneman (1973) pointed out that attention is not only selective and requires energy on the part of the listener, but also that it is a limited-capacity resource that can be flexibly allocated to the various constituents of information processing.
According to this theory, listeners can change their attentional distribution from moment to moment, depending on the varying energy needs of alternating con
scious and automatic mental tasks: as the latter needs little attentional energy, it will not interfere with other ongoing information-processing tasks. The effort and capacity theory of Kahneman (1973) was later adapted and developed into an ef
fort model for interpretation by Daniel Gile (1995), consisting of three main com
ponents: listening and analysis effort; speech production effort; and short-term memory effort.
Due to the fact that mental energy needs may be as big or even bigger than the available processing capacity, interpreters try to use their individual capacity to its fullest potential, distributing and redistributing their attention among the various
‘efforts’. If listening requirements go up, less attention will be paid to reformula
tion, or lags and passages will become shorter, in order to ease the strain on mem
ory. If, on the other hand, the interpreter is too preoccupied with producing a care
fully phrased speech, it could take up much processing capacity and thus impair the listening process. Experienced interpreters have learned to recognize their limi
tations concerning processing needs, and act immediately to redress the balance:
stop taking notes, shorten the lags, wait for a clue etc. In extreme situations, how
ever, even they may reach a saturation point (high speech density, low predictabili
ty, unfavourable external factors, great syntactical difference between SL and TL), which will impair the quality of interpretation. Students should be made aware of their limitations and the available “coping tactics”, to be practiced in various grad
ed exercises: starting from linguistically simple, straightforward, well-organised, low-density speeches on general topics to high-density talks on more specialized subjects, and even to poorly organised and delivered speeches with a background
noise. They are not instructed to apply any of the above tactics but the available options would be discussed after each exercise.
While listening for comprehension, interpreters attend to and select various stimuli; analyze them and assign meaning to them; draw inferences; anticipate lin
guistic structure and new information and fill in gaps according to context; fur
thermore organise new information and relate it to previously gained knowledge (building a web of associations).
Although associations are of a highly individual nature and not something to be taught, there are some exercises that could help students “keep fit” mentally, by seeking to establish links and mobilizing previously gained knowledge. E g. they are given a specific topic or idea to comment on, with no time or just a few min
utes for preparation. After the first protests (they don’t know anything on the sub
ject), they will usually find something to say, and when they are required to expand on it, they will be usually surprised how much they know. This is also a great confi
dence-building exercise: it makes them realize that they have more to rely on than they have previously thought.
The operations related to the listening phase also serve as prerequisites for re
tention and recall: only stimuli that have been attended to can enter the memory system. Short-term memory (STM) capacity is limited to 7 +/- 2 meaningful units (the ‘magical number seven’, as called by G. A. Miller 1956). It serves as a tempo
rary store or working memory where units are stored for a few seconds until recog
nized and reformulated (e.g. for the duration of ‘lags’ in simultaneous interpreta
tion), or until inversions are made in the target language. Although STM capacity cannot be extended, it can be used more effectively by using
(1) categorical clustering (e.g. US, France, Germany, Japan, UK rearranged as France, Germany, UK, US and Japan.
(2) generalisation (instead of Portugal, Spain and Italy: Southern Europe) (3) chunking techniques (e.g. grouping items that can be related, telephone
numbers and other data)
The above techniques can only be used if interpreters possess the relevant background knowledge for recognizing or creating categories and thus rearranging sequences or applying a more general term accordingly; or relating and storing units in one chunk, while others lacking the relevant background knowledge would have to store them in several chunks (e.g. TCTI, ELTE University, Budapest: 1-8 chunks). Units are stored for maximum 20-60 sec in STM, and then either perish or — after further processing — will be referred to the long-term or permanent memory store (LTM).
LTM plays a key role not only in consecutive interpretation but comprehensive listening in general. According to R. Schank and R. Abelson (1976), we cannot process information at any level without relying on our memory. Furthermore, they also point out that we draw up schemata or scripts that represent relation
ships among concepts and perform three important functions:
(1) establish expectations of what is going to happen (anticipation) (2) structure our comprehension when listening (organisation) (3) guide recall of events or information (remembering)
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The more scripts an interpreter knows, the less processing capacity will be needed for listening comprehension and more attention can be paid to other operations.
Meaning will be assigned after having searched one’s long-term memory con
taining thousands of highly individualized categories, to find out where new infor
mation would fit. As each person’s categories are different, comprehension is large
ly dependent on one’s personal frame of reference and perceptual filter (attitudes, beliefs, values and assumptions). True understanding can only be achieved if the interpreter is capable of putting himself in the speaker’s frame of reference (empa
thy), and tries to draw only justifiable inferences that are based on the speaker’s ideas.
While STM capacity is limited and thus could be subject to overload, LTM is- considered to be infinitely expansible. There is a vast number of books on memory techniques aiming to improve retention and recall (loci system, link system, pho
netic system, rhyming, peg-word, mnemonic devices, categorical clustering, chunk
ing, etc.). However, most of them would require too much processing capacity for convenient use in interpretation as (with the exception of clustering and chunking) they impose out-of-context associations on the units to be retained. It may be in
teresting to note that according to a survey, memory experts themselves fail to use most of these techniques, and prefer to rely on written notes, lists, categorical clus
tering, and rehearsal. Instead of experimenting with memory tricks, interpreters should make the best possible use of their processing skills. Although each person’s processing capacity is limited, it may be used to its fullest potential by capitalizing on the differential between speech speed and thought speed, and directing and redirecting attentive energy to the various efforts according to changing require
ments.
In order to demonstrate students how their memory operates and highlight the importance of information management, the students of the TCTI are admin
istered a memory test usually on the first week of the course, and then a similar test at the end of the first semester.
These tests contain seven-item lists of unknown names;
(1) familiar names (entertainers);
(2) names with titles (well-known politicians);
(3) related data and numbers (e.g. about a house for sale);
(4) mixed items that could be rearranged according to categories (e.g. depart
ments, countries, organisations);
(5) items related to the same concept; unrelated data;
and three 3-minute passages:
(1) a detailed description of a procedure (e.g. how to play golf);
(2) a short narrative (with details that are easy to visualise);
(3) a point made by a public speaker (with rather complicated reasoning).
The lists and passages will be delivered only once, at a normal rate of speech.
Students will reproduce each list only after five seconds, to eliminate the effects of echoic memory. The reproduced passages will be analysed later, to be checked for key ideas, links, and accuracy of detail. The answer sheets with the scores will be compared with the results of a similar test at the end of the term. These tests en
able students to see if and how their capacity for retention and recall has changed in the meantime. Findings show that their score remains more or less the same on the randomly compiled lists (e.g. both familiar and unfamiliar names of persons and organisations).
On the other hand, they usually achieve a better score on lists where certain in
formation-management techniques (e.g. association, categorisation) or visualisation could be relied on. The same improvement can be seen in the recall of 3-minute passages: both procedural and narrative texts become more accure and detailed, and an especially big jump is usually experienced in the score of the reasoning-type text (20-50% but in some cases students have almost doubled their score.) These changes are probably due to the fact that students are encouraged to process and visualise information consciously: even when they prepare a written analysis, they are required to memorize it visually, and recall the text without their notes. Later they will find it easier to rely on their visual memory even when they process the passage mentally, without a written analysis.
The positive effects of conscious processing have also been born out by an ex
periment conducted earlier in theTCTI, to analyze and compare interpretations of short formal speeches made by professional and trainee interpreters. A semantic and quantitative speech analysis was performed on the basis of the interpretations made of a 3.2-minute after-dinner speech and a 6.8-minute opening address by 7 experienced interpreters and 8 trainees who have just completed the first semester of the course. It was found that the novice interpreters’ achievement had been in
ferior in some respects, e.g. they were less confident speakers: with a 15% lower rate of speech, about twice as many hesitations: repetitions, wrong starts, filled and unfilled pauses; and they were less skillful communicators, using far fewer explica
tions than the other group (G. Láng-Pléh 1985).
Surprisingly enough, however, hardly any difference was found between the two groups on the basis of the semantic analysis of their interpretations: an almost equal number of informative elements had been retained; redundancy had been increased and reduced to similar extent; and about the same amount of relevant information omitted or misinterpreted. In spite of students’ lack of experience and lower rate of credibility (they were immediately identified as trainees by several groups of listen
ers on the basis of their recordings), the semantic content of their interpretations compared favorably to those rendered by experienced interpreters. We tend to think that this could be due to the fact that they had acquired the necessary coping tac
tics and enhanced their processing skills during the first semester of their training, and the targeted practice at the beginning of the course, geared towards develop
ing interpreting skills, has proved to be a useful part of the training process.
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References
G. Láng Zs., Pléh Cs. 1985. A gyakorlat szerepe a tolmácsolásban. Hogyan tolmácsolnak rövid alkalmi beszédeket kezdő és tapasztalt tolmácsok (The Importance of Experience. Inter
pretation of Short Formal Speeches by Trainees and Professionals). In: Fordításelméleti füzetek 3., ed. by K. Klaudy. Budapest: MTA. 26-44.
Gile, D. 1995. Basic Concepts and Models for Interpreter and Translator Training. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
Isham, P.W. 1994. Memory for Sentence after Simultaneous Interpretation; Evidence both for and against Deverbalization. In: Bridging the Gap. ed. by S. Lambert, B. Moser-Mercer.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 191-213.
Jakobson, R. L. 1986. Memory Experts’ Advice: Forget about the String about your Finger. The Chronicle of Higher Education. 33. 49.
Kahneman, D. 1973. Attention and Effort. Englewood Cliffs, New Kersey: Prentice Hall.
Nichols, R. P. 1957. Listening is a 10 Part Skill. Nations Business. 45.4.
Miller, G. A. 1956. The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information. Psychological Review 63. 81-97.
Seleskovitch, D. 1975. Language, langue et mémoire. Etudes de la prise de notes en interpretation consecutive. Paris: Minard.
Schank, R., Abelson, R. 1976. Scripts, Plans, Goal, and Understanding. Hillsdale, New Kersey:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Wolvin, A., Coakley, C. G. 1982. Listening. Iowa: Wm. C. Brown Publishers.
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Sándor ALBERT; Born: 1949 Baja, Hungary; Address: JATE, József Attila University of Szeged, Dept, of French Language and Literature, H-6722 Szeged, Egyetem u. 2-4., Hungary; Telephonelfax: (36) 62 454 243; Qualification: MA in French Language and Literature, MA in Russian Language and Literature (JATE);
Degree: 1989: PhD in Applied Linguistics; Position: 1973-1978: Teacher (Tóth Kál
mán Grammar School, Baja); 1978-1980: Teaching Assistant (JATE); 1980-1989:
Assistant Professor (JATE); since: 1989 Senior Lecturer (JATE), translator of French authors ind.: G. Duby, J. Baudrillard, J-P. Sartre, A. Moles, R. Barthes etc.; Also: Member of Translation Research Committee of Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS); Special interests: translation theory, philosophy of language, philo
sophical implications of translation activity, translation criticism; For more details see: International Who’s Who in Translation and Terminology, Praetorius. 1995. 6.
István BART; Born: 1944 Budapest, Hungary; Address: Corvina Publishing House, H-1051 Budapest, Vörösmarty tér 1. Hungary; Telephone: (36) 11 184 148;
Fax: (36) 11 184 410; Qualification: MA in Hungarian Language and Literature, MA in English Language and Literature (ELTE); Position: since 1972: Editor, later Editor in Chief, Európa Publishers; since 1984: director of the Corvina Publishing House; writer, translator of English and American prose and drama inch: Walter Scott, E.A. Poe, E. Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, B. Malamud, L. Ferlinghetti, Pynchon, H. Ibsen, Strindberg, S. Freud, Stoppard etc.;Also: since 1977: Member of Hungarian Writers Association; since 1972: Member of the Hungarian PEN Centre; 1982-1989: General Secretary of Hungarian PEN Centre; since 1991:
President of Hungarian Publishers’and Booksellers’ Association (MKKE); Special interests: publishing and language policy.
József BEND IK; Born: 1951 Técső, USSR; Address: H-2040 Budaörs, Szabad
ság u. 164, Hungary, Telephone: (36) 20 446 972; Qualification: MA in English Language and Literature, MA in French Language and Literature; Degree: 1988:
PhD in Linguistics; Position: since 1973: Teacher of English and French at various secondary schools in the former U.S.S.R. and Hungary; 1979-1988: Educational Programme Specialist, Hungarian National Commission (UNESCO, Budapest);
1989: Lecturer (ELTETCTI), since 1995: Free Lance Interpreter; Also: Member of Translation Research Committee (HAS), Member of Association of Hungarian Translators and Interpreters (MFTE), Member of European Society for