Is Speed Detrimental to Culture - How do Students Simultaneously Interpret Culture-Bound Terms?

This paper will present a study of culture-bound terms in simultaneous interpreting of trainee simultaneous interpreters by using a combination of Newmark's (1988), Vinay’s (qtd. in Klaić, 1992) and Ivir's (1998) grids of different procedures for culture-bound terms that translators/interpreters can use. This paper attempts to investigate the preferred procedures of student-interpreters working under significant time-constraints. It is a well-known fact that language is embedded in the culture of the people and that it is primarily a cultural and social product (Troskot, 1992). Interpreters serve as mediators between languages, but since languages do not exist in a vacuum it is the interpreter’s task to convey not only the formal level of the message (lexical, grammatical, syntactic level), but semantic, aesthetic, and connotative levels as well. The corpus is composed of recorded interpreting sessions of 19 first-year graduate students interpreting speeches from the Speech Repository Portal during three months of training. The instances of culture-bound items and their interpretations were identified and analyzed with the aim of identifying the preferred strategies. The basic quality standards in interpreting are accuracy, adequacy, equivalence and successful communicative interaction (Pöchhacker, 2002). In the corpus we tried to gain information about equivalency (intended effect) of the source and target text, since accuracy does not necessarily imply adequacy and equivalence. The results show that the students mostly use naturalization/borrowing, literal translation and omission. The findings have implications for interpreter theory, practice, and training, but the insights may also be valuable for teaching English at primary, secondary and tertiary levels, when the linguistic and extralinguistic knowledge base (Gile, 2009), including cultural awareness, is being built