Research background

Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Research background

In the field of interpreting, “experience” is considered a necessary criterion for

“competent professional interpreters” by the AIIC (International Association of Conference Interpreters), which requires all its membership applicants to have at least 150 days of work experience (AIIC, n.d.). Researchers also found more experienced interpreters’ output of higher quality, which was likely linked to certain skills or strategies observed in their performance (Kuenzli & Moser-Mercer, 1995; Lambret, 2004; Moser-Mercer, 1997).

Aspiring students of interpreting hope to become skillful interpreters one day. To achieve the goal, they are often suggested to look at and learn from the performance of more experienced interpreters. The suggestion is made on the assumption that experienced interpreters have knowledge and skills that novices don’t. Ideally, by comparing the differences between their own performance and their more seasoned counterparts’, trainee interpreters would gain insight into what they lack and discover strategies that could be borrowed to improve interpreting skills or performance.

However, when trainee interpreters listen to more experienced interpreters’

performance, more often than not, they only make general observation, describing their impression in vague language such as “good”, “fluent”, “comprehensive” or their synonyms. What exactly are the differences? Which is the most significant?

What’s more, how can possible strategies be inferred from the observed differences in delivery when strategies, or decisions, are made prior to the output, in the blink of an eye, and only in the interpreters’ head?

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Altman (1994) believed that fluency “is the one single aspect” (p.36) that

distinguished novice and experienced interpreters. Although it’s questionable whether it is the only distinction, fluency does seem to be one commonly observed difference between novices and more experienced interpreters. Fluency is important to

interpreting because too many pauses, i.e. silent gaps in speech, or fillers such as uh and um would make the delivery choppy and hard to understand. What’s more,

audience seems to be particularly impressed by fluent interpreting. Fluency is stressed in interpreting teaching and exam assessment (楊承淑, 2000). 楊承淑 (2000)

suggested students to avoid pauses longer than 2 seconds. During my training as an interpreting student, I have noticed students do work hard to avoid fillers and overly long pauses.

Moreover, long or frequent silent pauses in a student’s interpreting performance are often treated as signals of difficulty by the teachers and classmates, prompting them to ask if the student had come across any problems. Sometime they found the source text (in the case of sight translation) or source speech (in the case of

consecutive or simultaneous interpreting) conceptually difficult, syntactically complex or too fast so that they didn’t catch the meaning. Sometimes they found it hard to think of a translation for a word or a sentence structure. Sometimes they did come up with a translation, but hesitated because it sounded too literal. As time goes by, students do seem to become more fluent. Does the impression of more fluency come from reduced pauses? If so, why have the pauses reduced? Because difficulties associated with pauses had been reduced by training? Or perhaps, during the training, they have acquired certain skills or strategies to avoid making pauses? Are all pauses to be avoided? During the training, sometimes students are advised, by teachers or classmates, to pause a little bit when outputting interpreting delivery so that their audience could understand them better. Moreover, it seems that this kind of pausing

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serves not only the audience but also the interpreters because they buy themselves more time to think without hampering the audience’s understanding.

Chiang, Kuo, & Chen (2009) discovered that when sight-translating, beginners paused significantly longer and more frequently than advanced students. Moreover, the influence of directionality over pauses reduced in the case advanced students.

Chiang et al. (2009) believed that the results show that with more training, the advanced students “know how to exercise certain strategies” (p.163) to avoid too many silent pauses in both languages. They also proposed an interesting idea called

“inappropriate pauses,” which occurred within clauses. So there are in fact

“appropriate” and “inappropriate” pauses? Their findings seem to echo with my personal experience.

It seems that “pauses” are a topic worth studying. The number of pauses in an interpreters’ delivery may be related to her experience. It also seems that there are interpreting skills or strategies that help avoid pauses or insert more “appropriate”

pauses. It would benefit trainee interpreters a lot if they know more about the relationship between pauses in more experienced interpreters’ performance and strategies that may be involved.

While previous studies that compare interpreters with different levels of experience suggested more experienced interpreters employ better strategies of various kinds, the argument was made solely on the basis of the recordable

end-product and the researchers’ observation and insights (Ericsson, 2000; Shlesinger, 2011). Observations were made and possible strategies were inferred from the output based on the researchers’ experience and discretion. Researchers would like to know more about what’s going on in the interpreters’ mind when interpreting, but there are not many tools (Tiselus & Jenset, 2011). Among the few available tools for studying cognitive activities during interpreting, the eye-tracker is one of them.

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