Distancing vs. simplification: where are the interpreter’s priorities?

The present paper aims at confronting two claims found in the literature on interpreter’s linguistic strategies and to compare these with translator’s strategies in a parallel intermodal corpus (PIC). The claims are as follows: (1) Simultaneous interpreters work under extreme cognitive load and, as a result, seek to simplify production by simplifying syntactic structures (Ilg 1978; Setton 1999; Seeber 2011) (2) Simultaneous interpreters have face concerns and, as a result, have a tendency to distance themselves from the speaker of the source text (Monacelli 2009) I will investigate the two claims with data for which I believe they are contradictory: the use of causal connective items by Dutch interpreters. Indeed, Dutch possesses several subordinate causal connectives (omdat, aangezien,doordat…) and one coordinate causal connective (want). As word order in Dutch differs substantially between main (or coordinated) and subordinate clauses, claim (1) predicts that interpreters will transform subordinate clauses into coordinated clauses, so as to avoid the complex syntax of verb-final subordinate clauses in their production. As a consequence, the frequency of the coordinate connective (want) will be higher than that of its French counterpart in the source texts (car). On the other hand, according to Degand & Maat (2003), Pit (2003) and Pit (2007), causal connectives can be distinguished by different degrees of subjectivity: Dutch want and aangezien score high on the subjectivity scale, whereas omdat and doordat are closer to the opposite end of the scale. In Pit’s analysis, subjectivity is based on particular features of the causal participant (i.e. the participant affected by the causal relationship). From Monacelli’s claim that interpreters have a tendency to distance themselves from the speaker, it follows that the interpreters’ choice of connective items is likely to be less subjective than that of speakers. Frequencies of objective causal connectives (omdat, doordat) should therefore be higher in the interpreted texts than in the source texts. The hypotheses are contradictory, as the coordinate connective want is expected at the same time to be more frequent in interpretations because it allows syntactic simplification, and to be less frequent because it is highly subjective. In order to find out which tendency is given priority by interpreters, I analysed the use of a set of causal connective items in a so-called parallel intermodal corpus (PIC), i.e. a corpus of authentic source and target texts, both spoken and written (interpreted and translated) and delivered in comparable contexts (Bernardini 2014). The corpus I used is based on data retrieved from sittings of the European Parliament held between 1st September 2008 and 21st October 2008. The original French speeches and their Dutch interpretations are drawn from EPICG (European Parliament Interpreting Corpus Ghent), a larger corpus consisting of transcriptions of speeches held during plenary sessions of the European Parliament and of their interpretations. In its current shape, it comprises approximately 190,000 words. Written data were collected from the verbatim reports of the same French source texts and their translations in Dutch. The translations were used to verify whether interpreters’ strategies diverged from translator’s strategies. The results show that the frequency of the coordinate connective increases drastically in interpreters’ performances, showing that the simplification of syntactic structure is given priority, in spite of increased subjectivity. This strategy sets interpreters apart from translators. References Degand, L & H. Pander Maat. 2003. ‘A contrastive study of Dutch and French causal connectives on the Speaker Involvement Scale’. In A. Verhagen & J. van de Weijer (eds.) Usage-Based Approaches to Dutch. Lexicon, grammar, discourse. Utrecht : LOT. Ilg, G. 1978. L’apprentissage de l’interprétation simultanée. Parallèles, 1:69-99. Monacelli, C. (2009). Self-Preservation in Simultaneous Interpreting. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Pit, M. 2003. How to express yourself with a causal connective. Utrecht: USLC. Pit, M. 2007. ‘Cross-linguistic analyses of backward causal connectives in Dutch, German and French’. Languages in Contrast, 7(1), pp. 53–82. Seeber, K. 2011. “Cognitive load in simultaneous interpreting: Existing theories – new models.” Interpreting 13 (2): 176-204. Setton, R. 1999. Simultaneous Interpretation: A cognitive-pragmatic analysis. Amsterdam: Benjamins