Chapter Six Conclusion
This chapter presents the conclusion and limitation of the research.
Suggestions for future studies are also highlighted here.
6.1 Conclusion
Directionality has been a long debated issue. Interpreting into A and
interpreting into B have been the center of the discussion and concern. Some believe that interpreting into A is the standard way of practice and actually follow; for example, one respondent in the survey took time to state that the interpreters in their country usually work into A although they must have the ability to work into their B language sometimes. ASTTI even supports the practice of B-A to the degree that the organization actually draws it down as one of the admission criteria for its active members. Many empirical studies are carried out and have revealed important clues.
These clues are examined by this study and they turn out to be the factors that may determine directionality, especially when it comes to questioning the validity of claiming working from one’s foreign language into mother tongue is a standard as many have heard.
Foreign monks who came to Ancient China teaching Buddhist scripture but did not speak Chinese relied on the assistance of interpreters who might as well be another foreign monk that learned Chinese as a foreign language. In the West, Christopher Columbus had to train the natives in the Americas to speak Spanish so that through them communication between the Spaniard and the Native Americans was possible. The Nuremburg Trial in 1945 was when simultaneous interpretation
direction the Trial adopted because it was found that interpreting into B yielded a better quality thus all SI interpreters were asked to interpret into their foreign tongue in the Trail. Today, Globalization and accession to international or regional
organizations (i.e. EU) require interpreters of smaller languages to practice AB retour.
These facts and evidence tell us one thing: interpreting is a task also subject to market demand so far and should not be marked otherwise.
Many places in fact have never credited working into A as a standard code.
Countries in Central and Eastern Europe have always practiced working into B that has now even become the dominant direction in some cases. Graduate interpreter training in Germany have never switched their focus on the teaching of working into B (Szabari 2002). Some schools in Eastern Europe have always believed in the quality generated whe n interpreting from A (Donovan 2002). Many of the respondents
regardless which group they represent in our survey clearly specify that although they are aware of the standard claim, they justify interpreting in both directions and the most oft-cited reason is market reality. In other words, market reality still sets the practice of AB retour in many parts of the world today.
The truth is, in our small number of survey respondents, two (including
another respondent from the pretest) in the interpreter’s group reported they had never heard of the standard claim. Both of them chose not to take a side on the issue of directionality but they did specify that they worked in both directions when
interpreting assignments were referred to them. One of them, again as we have heard many times from other respondents, contributed his reason of practice to the market for the necessity of AB retour and the other simply believed that interpreters should
be able to work both ways and any insisted direction was a result of personal
preference. All these facts and evidences indicate two things: interpreting into A was never a tradition to begin with and the task of interpreting is subject to market reality.
In contrast to taking a side on directionality, there are also those who do not support any particular interpreting direction and they practically stay neural on the issue. For instance, institutes in Europe such as the Institute of English, University of Silesia in Poland and the Institute for Translation and Interpreting, University of Vienna in Austria do not systematically favor working into either direction and the truth is they expect their graduates to work in both directions. (Bartlomiejczyk 2004). The survey results of the present study also support the existence of those who do not take a side on the issue as three respondents from the group of institute directors and interpreters indicate. According to the three retour languages (English, French and German) as mentioned by AIIC and the survey results (i.e. one respondent pointed out that their school required AB retour in Asian languages for both SI and CI), this study has reasons to believe that other than the many European countries, Asia, where most countries do not have any of the three retour languages as a public standard code, is another market in demand of AB retour so far today.
As far as language is concerned, not only do we need a clearer definition for the working languages of interpreters but we may want to reconsider the language terms such as mother to ngue, of which the definition appears to slide among various existing common definitions resulting in the inconsistency of granting one the title of being the native speaker of a particular language; for example, an interpreter may be recognized as having a language as his/her A (either it is his/her mother tongue or dominant language based on the existing definition identified by the field of
interpretation), and yet the very same person may turn out to be unqualified to claim the native status of that language in the eyes of another. More important, as the current A language definition seems to yield acceptance to either the interpreter’s mother tongue or the dominant language (As the language later replaced the mother tongue), the gap between mother tongue and dominant language in terms of language competence is distinguished by age of acquisition according to the Critical Period Hypothesis. In other words, the present language classification for interpreters may not be a credible system and thus urgently requires more research attention. The fact that this study must first work out temporary definitions for language terms for the rest of the discussions regarding directionality to be based on shows the language issue requires further research urgently.
What about interpreting into A as a standard since the claim is that this direction generates better interpreting quality than the other way around? To answer the question, we must go back to the important clues derived out of the literature.
These clues or factors so far identified are experience of interpreters, specific
language combinations, context, interpreting norms and people that are involved in SI.
They may affect the quality of AB retour in terms of content accuracy and/or presentation quality. What is important about these factors is that they do not have much to relate to the discussions on the advantages/problems for the source and target languages being native or nonnative to the interpreter. The purpose and function of this study is simple. It is inviting us to take a different and closer look at directionality, including the validity of interpreting into A being always a “better” direction as
claimed. The quality of interpretation is more than what native and nonnative
input/production can justify. It can be challenged by other elements and what happens
is that the “end product” may be affected by these elements. Interpreting into A or interpreting into B thus cannot always be a better or a worse direction to work in.
6.2 Research Limitation
This research adopts a qualitative questionnaire survey so the survey results cannot reach a quantitative conclusion. Neither the researcher nor the respondents had a second chance to make additional clarification as visiting interviews allow unless a follow-up is in the arrangement. Information contained in the returned questionnaires might be incomplete in the sense that it was unlikely the collected data represented the respondents’ full knowledge on what was asked. In addition, some of the factors identified by this study require future research for addition support of their validity.
For example, more studies should be designed to test the factor of experience across language direction (and perhaps its interaction with different language combinations if there is one) since all of the previous studies reviewed were not specifically designed for such objective, except for Barik (1994) who had close enough results to suggest a performance difference across language direction (English/French) on the basis of the experience of his SI participants.
6.3 Suggestion for Future Studies
The interpreting quality of a certain language direction (A-B or B-A) may not always be better or worse and knowing this sets us free. For example, in terms of course arrange ment, we no longer have to worry as much about finding a
teacher/instructor who must have a particular A and B in order to teach a course in the direction of B-A without taking other things into consideration, such as experience and expertise. Market reality is an intriguing phenomenon; for instance, we
understand that interpreting in both directions is a must for small languages. However, Mandarin Chinese is by no means a small language simply considering the number of its worldwide (native) speakers today. Why is it still difficult to find, for example, English A interpreters who have Chinese as his/her B or C (i.e. in Taiwan) (Chang 2005)? What can possibly cause this curiosity? In addition, the factors identified in this study require further exploration for more support; one example is that language combinations which favor interpreting into A and those into B or the ones that pose similar difficulty at the linguistic level should be identified. Once such identification is made, interpreter’s training may be planned and carried out more effectively.
Furthermore, how do the factors interact with one another, if they do at all?
Does one dominate the other and how (i.e. Can one be used to offset another or more)?
Interaction of factors that determine directionality is definitely a seek-out point for future studies. Are there other factors that have yet to surface? Chatilov (2003)
discovers that native listeners do not need to hear the whole word or phrase in order to understand what it means (The study was carried in the context of listening
comprehension, not in SI). The perception of the main part, mostly the root morpheme, is enough for a native listener to achieve comprehension. Then, by following the
word-form rules of a given language the native listener quickly and accurately understands the word or phrase. A nonnative listener, on the other hand, needs more time to extract the meaning of what is heard and consequently it slows down the comprehension process. In other words, native listeners have better and faster linguistic anticipation compared to nonnative listeners, as in one of the two kinds of anticipation (The other is extralinguistic anticipation) an interpreter uses to predict what a speaker is likely to say next (Besien, 1999). Conrad (1981) also indicates that
the difficulty for a nonnative listener lies in extracting semantic information from the source text. Despite the fact that neither Chatilov’s nor Conrad’s study was tested and measured in the context of SI, the results may serve as evidence that point to the disadvantage listeners are exposed to when listening to a nonnative language
especially when input rate is high. Therefore, apart from what we have already known from the early days that SI performance deteriorates as speech rates increases (Gerver 1969), how do input rates affect interpreting performance across language direction?
Too many important questions anxiously await future research to take a closer look.
Interpreting into A was never a golden rule. Having a better understanding of the factors that are likely to affect SI directionality and knowing how to make good use of these factors bring us better prospects of gain than simply worrying about not having enough interpreters speaking a “rare” B or C. From here, we can carry out interpreting as a task and training more successfully. We need to start asking
questions other than simply examining our interpreters through the “native-nonnative glasses” before we can see the best interpreters have always been there.
