Context in simultaneous interpretation

Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 374–389 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Context in simultaneous interpretation Robin Setton a,b,c,* a

Graduate Institute of Translation and Interpretation Studies (GITIS), Fu Jen Catholic University, 510 Chongcheng Road, 242 Hsinchuang, Taipei, Taiwan b ETI, University of Geneva, Switzerland c 236 rue St. Martin, Paris 75003, France Received 8 February 2005; received in revised form 18 June 2005; accepted 1 July 2005

Abstract Translation has recently been analysed in the terms of modern cognitive–pragmatic theory (relevance theory) as an interlingual interpretive use of language (Gutt, 1991/2000). But Gutt’s account primarily addresses the principles and processes of text or written translation, where the displacement in time and place between the original communicator, the translator and her readers requires the translator to reconstruct the original informative intention, project the original and target addressees’ cognitive environment, and craft a stimulus according to the degree of interpretive resemblance sought. By contrast, oral translation, in particular simultaneous interpreting (SI), is performed in live situations in which the interpreter shares most of the manifest cognitive environment with the participants and is thus better able to project and control the contexts in which her addressees will process her utterances. Since the condition of simultaneity severely constrains the simultaneous interpreter’s choice of stimulus, she relies heavily on this access to immediate context and her audience’s inferential abilities. Text translators need time to project context and choose their stimuli, while in SI, access to live contexts compensates for temporal constraints. The paper concludes with a discussion on prospects for exploring patterns and possible biases in interlingual text and oral communication on this basis. # 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Simultaneous interpreting; Translation; Context; Relevance; Resemblance; Fidelity

1. Introduction A special issue of a leading pragmatics journal devoted to context in translation must reflect the hope among some linguists, at least, that this particular type of language use can shed light on the role of context in linguistic communication generally. In translation studies, much recent * Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected]. 0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2005.07.003

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work has been devoted to identifying distinctive features of translational language, such as dilution or explicitation, leading to interesting speculation about constraints and biases in intercultural communication. Insofar as beliefs and ideas are transmitted through a chain of alternating public and private representations, such studies of the forms and products of translation and their reception need to be complemented by a psychological, cognitive account: the patterns observed may reflect norms of translation, or actual processing differences between translational and ‘sovereign’ language use attributable to the conditions under which interlingual secondary communication is performed. We agree with Gutt (1991/2000) that translation (oral or written) is adequately accounted for within a general cognitive theory of communication, and that relevance theory provides such a framework. Relevance theorists have until now been chiefly concerned with demonstrating the explanatory power of the theory in various areas, but one of its central axioms—that human (verbal) communication is by its very nature imperfect—invites us to take a further step towards understanding communication in the real world, in and across societies, by studying the factors that play a role in its success or failure. This has traditionally been a central concern of translation studies, but as that experience shows, although perhaps due to a lack of theoretical tools in the discipline, it poses substantial methodological challenges. In pragmatics, the typical laboratory for theory building has been conversational dialogue, with reconstructed examples used to illustrate theoretical points. The value of translation as a laboratory for understanding the factors in successful verbal communication (beyond the local and possibly pedagogical interest of such processes in translation itself) depends on identifying the parameters and constraints specific to its different forms—oral and written, in particular—as distinct from those operating in monolingual, ‘sovereign’ verbal exchanges. Assuming certain universal principles of human communication—that it is driven by relevance, and is ostensive–inferential—its success would seem to depend on two primary factors: communicators’ choice of stimuli (their competence) and their choice of contexts (and constraints on these). However, these choices themselves depend, in turn, on secondary parameters such as the communicators’ environment, the medium of communication (written, oral, or verbal–visual mixtures), and its pace (alternating, overlapping, deferred, and by whom it is determined). Dialogue and monologue, reading and writing, translation and interpreting each offer significant variations of these parameters, which constrain the contexts used by communicators and, therefore, the course and results of information processing in each of these forms of communication. To give just three examples:  participants in face-to-face conversation individually and jointly determine the speed of an exchange of utterances (overlaps, pauses) between specified addressees;  in text translation, a first communicator records a complete utterance on a permanent medium, for addressees more or less explicitly specified, then a second communicator interprets the effects provided by this utterance and composes a second utterance designed to provide similar effects to other addressees, at some future time, place and cognitive environment, more or less explicitly specified;  in simultaneous interpretation (SI), the primary communicators determine both the pace and environment of an exchange which the interpreters simulate in another language to provide similar cognitive effects to different addressees. Taking the relevance-theoretic account of communication as our framework and Gutt’s discussion of translation as a starting point, this paper will examine the processing differences

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between written translation and SI, particularly in terms of their constraints on the participants’ use of contexts, and discuss what light they shed on communication through a change of language.

2. Relevance, communication and translation As is well-known, relevance theory describes communication as a process in which a communicator forms an informative intention and produces an ostensive stimulus—linguistic in the case of verbal communication—which signals this intention to an addressee and entitles him to expect positive cognitive effects from processing it in a mutually manifest context. A context in this sense is a cognitive construct, a set of premises used in interpreting an utterance which is a subset of the hearer’s assumptions about the world, and ‘‘is not limited to information about the physical environment or the immediately preceding utterances: expectations about the future, scientific hypotheses or religious beliefs, anecdotal memories, general cultural assumptions, beliefs about the mental state of the speaker, may all play a role in interpretation’’ (Sperber and Wilson, 1995:15–16). The relevance-theoretic picture of communication is a radical departure from code-based models. Communication is now seen as ‘‘first and foremost a kind of constrained mind reading with linguistic (and perhaps other) codes just providing evidence’’ (Carston, 2002:364–365). The effects of verbal communication are now seen as the result of processing linguistic stimuli which provide only evidence of the thoughts a speaker intends to communicate in manifest contexts in order of their accessibility. When we come to consider translation, the extra step in the chain of communication, plus the change of language, may at first look like intractable additional complications. However, methodologically these conditions may actually be a bonus insofar as the translator’s product can be treated as a deliberate attempt to reproduce the communicative effect of the original utterance; and oral translation also preserves the live dimension of face-to-face interactive communication. But here, clearly the change of stimulus will be just as important as a change in accessible contexts. To dismantle the classic code model of communication, cognitive pragmatics has had to emphasize the role of context, but the contribution of the stimulus has not been thrown out with the bathwater: verbal stimuli encode rich and detailed information, and in particular, procedural constraints which guide hearers to fruitful contexts by reducing the space in which to search. A relevance-theoretic account of translation and interpreting must, therefore, attend equally to changes of stimulus and of context. Gutt’s basic premise is that most of what we usually recognize as translation—where the target text presumes to bear some resemblance to an original in another language rather than simply using the same information to produce a new text with a similar function—amounts to an interpretive use of language, i.e., it expresses not the translator’s thoughts, but her interpretation (derived from the source text) of the thoughts of another, the original communicator. The translator, thus, becomes a secondary communicator who guarantees that her utterance ‘‘is a faithful enough representation of the original: that is, resembles it closely enough in relevant respects’’ (Wilson and Sperber, 1988:137). Gutt calls this effort to communicate what the original expressed (its implicatures and explicatures) ‘indirect translation’, and proposes the theoretical notion of ‘direct translation’ to describe the limiting case of a translation which would offer a presumption of complete interpretive resemblance by also communicating how the original was expressed, through stylistic properties which are also taken to be ‘relevant aspects’ of the original. In practice, since a

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translator cannot for obvious reasons reproduce the linguistic properties of the original (as in direct quotation), he can attempt to preserve its stylistic effects as ‘communicative clues’, on the principle that ‘‘if a stimulus S causes the intended interpretation to be inferred in a context C by the communicative clues it provides, then if a stimulus S’ causes the same interpretation to be inferred in the same context, . . . it must provide the same communicative clues’’ (Gutt, personal communication). A translation is more ‘direct’ to the extent that a more complete interpretive resemblance is attempted. Gutt ascribes many failures of translation to a mismatch between the translators’ and users’ understanding of the type of resemblance being offered. 3. The cognitive unity of the SI process To the casual observer, the main difference between written translation and SI appears to be a matter of speed, which would entail under a code model that interpreters must be much faster than translators at retrieving equivalent terms, but that SI can still not possibly aspire to the same accuracy as written translation. Without explicitly drawing this inference, more sophisticated observers with a background in cognitive psychology, linguistics or translation have assumed that SI must entail ‘multitasking’, requiring divided attention to juggle between several simultaneous tasks, such as understanding, analysing, and reformulating, and have proposed various models to explain how these tasks might all be done at the same time. Although the first modeller of SI, a cognitive psychologist, recognized that the task must be unitary at high task loads (Gerver, 1976, citing Kahneman, 1973:193), even some professional practitioners involved in interpreter training have entertained ‘multitasking’ or componential models of SI, probably because bilinguals in the early stages of training do appear initially to be trying unsuccessfully to combine tasks like listening, translating, speaking, which they are used to performing separately or consecutively in ordinary language use. The case has been made elsewhere against modelling SI in terms of a juggling of attentional resources (Setton, 1999, 2002); here we shall make basically the same case for the unity of this task in pragmatic terms, arguing that SI relies on the same processes of stimulus enrichment and complementation as ordinary speech comprehension, and the same projection of hearers’ contexts and inferential abilities as in ordinary speech production; and that the only way it can be done under these extreme time and processing constraints is by drawing on one and the same simulated cognitive environment for these two processes. In a recent personal communication, Ernst-August Gutt put the following question, which I now take up with his permission as a starting point for the arguments in this paper. Gutt writes (my added emphasis in italics): [It seems that] the concept of interpretive resemblance calls for the construction of two mental representations and their comparison: as the interpreter keeps inferring and constructing the intended interpretation of the original speaker from the incoming utterances, she also has to form an informative intention of her own, that is, form—in relevance-theoretic terms—a body of thoughts {I’} that shares those thoughts with the original interpretation {I} (as she understood it) that she deems to be adequately relevant to her target audience AND she also has to compose a stimulus that will communicate her sets of thoughts {I’} to the target audience—without unnecessary processing effort on their part. . . . It would seem that these tasks of rapid comparison, evaluation of relevance with regard to the receptors’ cognitive environment, and production of a stimulus suited to the

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interpreter’s new informative intention are cognitive core activities in SI. Thus SI would be a very interesting testing ground for finding out more about the faculties that enable our minds to achieve such rapid assessment of similarities of bodies of thoughts, accompanied by very rapid assessments of relevance with regard to the receptor’s cognitive environment. Here we will examine whether it is necessary to assume that SI involves entertaining ‘‘two bodies of thoughts’’ with ‘‘rapid . . . assessment of similarities [between them and . . .] rapid assessments of relevance with regard to the receptor’s cognitive environment’’. (i) The first task described is utterance comprehension (inferring and constructing the intended interpretation of the original speaker from the incoming utterances), which may indeed clash with other simultaneous tasks. In negotiations or arguments, people who try to formulate their response while their opponent is talking often get caught out missing part of his argument, because this does indeed require divided attention: it is harder than what a simultaneous interpreter does, which is merely to listen and understand while thinking how to formulate these same meanings in another language.1 (ii) It seems to us that representing a speaker’s or an author’s informative intention is an automatic by-product of the thorough understanding which Gutt himself insists is necessary for good translation (1991:164), and that in accepting her assignment with its implicit task definition and norms, the interpreter automatically undertakes to simulate and appropriate the informative intentions of the speakers she will interpret. More concentration may be needed to understand and appropriate a speaker’s informative intention aurally at the first pass from an unfolding speech than from a text for translation, which can be re-read; but nothing appears to require a distinction between the interpreter’s assimilation of the speaker’s informative intention and the formation of the interpreter’s ‘own’ intention. It has been said that there is much of the actor in the simultaneous interpreter; but the acting part of her task is much easier than for the professional thespian; she is not expected to act with her whole body, not even indeed her voice; and she has much more to work with, since her model is alive and performing in front of her, rather than requiring interpretation and construction from a written and possibly archaic fiction. The intense mental intimacy this implies is not to everyone’s taste; like actors, this state of mind may be followed by emptiness or a loquacious pseudo-euphoria. But we would not normally assume that acting requires rapid comparison between two bodies of thoughts or representations, the actor’s and his character’s (or the author’s). (iii) The third task cited is to ‘‘evaluate relevance with regard to the receptors’ cognitive environment’’. This calls for closer examination with regard to situational and processing differences between written translation and interpreting, but also with regard to the proper application of the relevance-theoretic account to these activities. First, how and in what sense does a communicator—primary or secondary—‘‘evaluate relevance with regard to her addressees’ cognitive environment’’? The relevance of a communication is a measure of the positive cognitive effects that its addressees can be expected to derive for an acceptable processing effort. Positive cognitive effects are obtained when an 1

It is hard to extrapolate to SI from dichotic listening experiments in psycholinguistics, in which two different and external stimuli compete and thus divide attention, with a resulting decrement in performance on reporting the two different contents. In SI, the second channel (the interpreter’s own production) not only shares cognitive representations with the main channel but is also self-generated, so selective attention suffices.

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addressee derives assumptions that are significant extensions or modifications of his cognitive environment (roughly, are neither meaningless, tautological nor redundant) by processing the speaker’s successive utterances in contexts in this environment. Relevance is a trade-off between the richness of these effects and the effort needed to derive them, which, in turn, depends on the accessibility and salience of the fruitful contexts, and therefore, also on the competence of the speaker in guiding hearers to them. It follows that in formulating their contributions, communicators must have some underlying model of the degrees of manifestness of the contexts accessible to their addressees. Now as Sperber and Wilson point out, for an attentive listener the initial context for processing each utterance consists of the assumptions he derived from previous utterances, and the premises used; and this context can be extended if necessary to obtain positive effects, by adding chunks of information from recent short term memory (e.g., from earlier discourse), long-term memory (e.g., from the encyclopaedic entries of the words in the utterance), or perceptions of the immediate physical environment, which is continually sub-attentively monitored (Sperber and Wilson, 1995:139–141). On this account, the ‘task’ of projecting the contexts accessible to addressees must be significantly different for a communicator composing a written text and one addressing a live audience. In the live, in situ shared experience of a continuous or alternating speech exchange, most of the initial and secondary contexts —previous utterances, the physical environment, and even most of the contemporary encyclopaedic entries of the words used—are all simultaneously accessible in the short- and even the long-term memories of speaker, interpreter and audience. There are two kinds of potential disparity between the cognitive environments of interpreters and other participants; and the degree of simulation that is required and expected is set by both norms and processing constraints. Conference interpreters are expected to aim for the best possible simulation of whatever contexts (additional to the shared milieu) are common to the majority of their addressees, which might typically include current affairs, a knowledge of international law and organizations and their procedure, and a body of specialized technical or local (‘insider’) knowledge specific to the meeting. Conscientious professionals are well aware of this and are consequently notoriously insistent on obtaining advance documentation specific to the event, such as the agenda and the minutes of the last meeting to help them to complete their ‘simulation’ of the cognitive environment of their addressees. As a rule of thumb, simultaneous interpreters are not generally expected to take into account cognitive differences between individual addressees (an imponderable of all communication) or groups of addressees (such as cultural factors). SI is usually done in formalized international conferences with tacitly shared norms, whereby simultaneous conference interpreters are not expected to take the range of cultural backgrounds into account. Given this very substantial common ground—the ongoing speech, the immediate environment, the contemporary state of the world, the meanings conventionally associated with the words being used, and whatever supplementary local background the interpreter has managed to acquire—the ‘projection’ effort is limited to monitoring the relatively minor potential discrepancies between this simulation and the reality (participants from different cultures, for example), rather than maintaining a separate, entirely constructed ‘projected’ cognitive environment. An important difference thus appears between on-site interpreting and written, deferred translation with respect to the secondary communicator’s task of evaluating the relevance of her communication to her addressees, due essentially to the degree of displacement between the

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cognitive environments of the three sets of communicators involved. Chasms of time, distance and culture may separate the writer and his original intended audience from the translator and/or readers of the translation, often requiring a deliberate enterprise of reconstruction, sometimes through extensive research, of the cognitive environments of the original addressees, hence also of the probable communicative intention of the author, then another effort to project the environments of the target audience of the translation, not to mention the resulting challenges for composing the text. Conversely, this variable of access to the addressees’ immediate contexts is reflected in the pace appropriate to the type of exchange, with SI at one extreme. Consecutive interpreting—with notes, in chunks of up to 5 min—is a form intermediate in pace between deferred written translation and simultaneous interpreting. It is appropriate to various types of legal, medical and public-service (or community) interpreting, in which significant cognitive, social or cultural gaps between participants are often apparent, but can be negotiated given some flexibility for interruptions and explanations. A further relaxation of time constraints, as in deferred text translation, substantially broadens the range of material and the type and depth of cognitive effects that can be communicated through a change of language. Reading and writing are activities which can be interrupted to top up or adjust the availability and salience of useful contexts, or to dwell on a particular utterance and process it in various extended contexts at leisure. Readers and translators can choose to pause and devote more effort locally to deriving more contextual effects. Listeners can too, but at the cost of missing the next utterances; simultaneous interpreters, therefore, cannot, which rules out SI for poetic or literary discourse (Chernov, 2004), where effects are obtained by exploring an open-ended range of weak implicatures. Fortunately for SI, little more would be gained from such exploration of the discourse of international conferences, which is not particularly poetic, so processing can follow the basic principle of the standard comprehension procedure and stop at the first relevant interpretation. (iv) The fourth task envisaged in Gutt’s challenge is ‘‘to produce a stimulus suited to the interpreter’s new informative intention’’. To address speech production and its cognitive integration in the SI task, we must briefly go back and take a close look at the technical account of the search for relevance in utterance interpretation, then to the differences arising from the medium of each kind of translation (written versus oral). Sperber and Wilson wanted their concept of relevance to be near enough to the ordinary meaning of the word, but warn that it is nevertheless a more technical and precise notion (1995:119). In subsequent literature, the ordinary and technical notions have indeed sometimes become confused, adding to the apparent puzzle of how a translator, as an outsider, can know what is ‘relevant’ to her addressees, and whether she should be taking those kinds of decisions. An assumption is relevant to an individual in the technical sense to the extent that the positive cognitive effects achieved when it is optimally processed are large and the effort to achieve them is small (Sperber and Wilson, 1995:265–266). The only irrelevant utterances in this technical sense are those that are (in ordinary language) tautological, redundant or meaningless (cases (a) and (b) in Sperber and Wilson, 1995:143–144). In the everyday sense, an assumption (communicated by a speaker, for example) that is ‘irrelevant’ to an individual is one that he makes no effort to remember, process further, or apply to his life or experience. But this decision is only made after the assumption has been derived and is thus already a ‘positive cognitive effect’, which a translator or interpreter has no business to withhold, under most generally accepted professional norms.

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We can, therefore, say that, assuming she is fairly sure of her simulated cognitive environment, an interpreter aims2 to make available to her audience whatever cognitive effects she derives from the speaker’s utterances following the standard procedure of successive context extension weighed against processing effort, irrespective of which of these effects turn out to be of greater or lesser personal interest to her addressees—something which she can hardly know anyway even in a small meeting, let alone when interpreting for television. This explains why excellent translation and interpretation can be done by outsiders with no personal interest, given adequate information. Producing a stimulus suited to her informative intention is, therefore, another task that follows trivially from the state of mind and processing situation of the simultaneous interpreter (although its success obviously depends on her linguistic and professional competence in ways we shall return to later). Provided she has adequately adjusted her cognitive environment, she is cognitively on the same footing, so to speak, as the speaker and the audience, all of whom are simultaneously engaged in the comprehension, interpretation (in some sense) and/or production of spontaneous speech.3 In most text translation, in contrast, text is produced by switching between the recognizably distinct tasks of representing the writer’s intention, representing the reader’s environment and expectations, and deciding which features should be retained or more generally, as Gutt explains, what type of resemblance to aim at. The complexities are well illustrated in Gutt’s numerous examples from literary translation, and most eloquently in the canonical case of Bible translation, where the translator, or the publisher, may additionally be informed by her own complete and sophisticated representation of the moral, spiritual or evangelical message to be communicated. This can indeed be seen as a special case of the explicit or implicit instructions from the client which often constitute an additional factor to integrate in written translation, something which no one expects from simultaneous interpretation. In translation, too, provided that the readers understand what is being offered in terms of resemblance, the translator and his readers are on the same cognitive footing in the sense that the combination of time and text allows (or should allow) both of them a close, leisurely, and critical examination of their respective texts. This leisure on the reader’s part adds to the challenges that make translation akin to the literary arts (even for ostensibly non-literary texts). The translator’s work is exposed to a lingering scrutiny, with no opportunity for her to adjust her production to the reader’s reactions, or to exploit his limited short-term memory by making him forget an error or a weak expression. In summary, the core cognitive activities of simultaneous interpretation are not only each less demanding than their counterparts in attended sovereign language use or written translation, but can also share resources, making their fusion into a unified cognitive activity in real-time plausible. In particular, this is possible because these ‘tasks’ can share the same cognitive environment; in other words, all draw on the same hierarchy of accessible contexts that is central to all communication. A simultaneous interpreter cannot form two sets of thoughts and representations and continually compare them, but must instead align her cognitive environment to that of the participants, and use it both to understand the speaker and to formulate the stimuli which will be optimally relevant to her audience: a strategy which is feasible in SI, but not in deferred written translation. 2 Here we are being avowedly descriptive and prescriptive; this description probably fits the shared professional norms of conference interpretation. 3 This is the case only so long as a mismatch is not introduced, as for example, when a speaker presents a pre-prepared written text as a speech. Even when the text is given to the interpreter in advance, the resulting hybrid communication is likely to add to processing effort on nearly all sides.

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It should also be clear that SI is not just more successful when the interpreter approaches it in this way. Rather, real-time access to the shared, unfolding context is a necessary condition for SI. Access to contexts and temporal constraints are two sides of a coin: just as time is indispensable to solving the problems of written translation, only the simulation of accessible contexts afforded by sharing the time, place and direct experience of the original communication makes it feasible to interpret a spontaneous speech simultaneously at 120 words per minute. In short, if context is what makes translation good, it is what makes SI possible. 4. Communicativity in the transformed stimulus So far, we have not said much on the opportunities for ‘direct translation’ in SI. In aiming to offer a version that resembles the original in relevant respects, a translator may aim to convey ‘‘not only what was expressed, but also how it was expressed’’, through stylistic properties of the original (Gutt, 1991/2000:122). Complete interpretive resemblance can only be achieved in the theoretical case which Gutt calls ‘direct translation’, in which, always assuming that it is processed in identical contexts, the translation shares not only all the explicatures and implicatures of the original but also all its ‘communicative clues’. A translator may, therefore, aim for closer resemblance by attempting to reproduce some of the effects achieved by building similar clues into the translation. To what extent can a simultaneous interpreter use or rely on properties of the stimulus, and to what extent can or should the communicative clues they carry be reproduced in the interpreter’s product? In other words, can a simultaneous interpreter reproduce communicative clues across languages, and should she try? Instant production must obviously pose problems that are not faced by the text translator. Gutt defines direct translation as follows: ‘‘A receptor language utterance is a direct translation of a source language utterance if and only if it purports to interpretively resemble the original completely in the context envisaged for the original’’; direct translation ‘‘presumes to communicate the original intended interpretation only in the context envisaged by the original communicator’’ (Gutt, 1991/2000:163–164). Since a simultaneous interpreter has access to much more of this context, direct translation would seem on the face of it to be more feasible in SI than in text translation. The interpreter’s speech, like any other discourse, must contain such clues to achieve relevance. But in practice, the simultaneity constraints scramble the discourse, so that it becomes difficult to establish any more than occasional, indirect correspondences between communicative clues in the product and linguistic properties of the original. According to relevance theory, ‘‘ostensive stimuli, such as utterances . . . must satisfy two conditions . . . first, they must attract the audience’s attention; and second, they must focus it on the communicator’s intentions’’ (Sperber and Wilson, 1995:153). The first of these conditions is fulfilled in translation when a reader picks up a translation to read, or when a conference participant dons his headphones to follow the interpretation. As for the second, relevance theorists have developed an account of how linguistic stimuli focus an audience’s attention on the communicator’s intentions. In the last chapter of Relevance, Sperber and Wilson discuss the relationship between linguistic properties of utterances and their interpretation, and later relevance-theoretic work has developed this line of research into proposals about procedural elements in speech and text which guide readers and listeners to fruitful contexts (e.g., Blakemore, 1987; Wilson and Sperber, 1993). Pragmatic connectors, for example, conventionally pick out one or more assumptions in the current discourse to be jointly processed, while lexical choices evoke useful encyclopaedic contexts to be added.

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If these pointers are indeed a kind of code (‘procedural encoding’), a translator or interpreter should be able to follow them to obtain the intended effects, provided, crucially, that she processes the speech/text in the cognitive environment assumed by the speaker. But under SI conditions, even if she has correctly simulated her addressees’ cognitive environment, can the interpreter realistically follow the strategy of trying to match these pointers to help them to the same effects? A simultaneous interpreter cannot produce a sequential phrase by phrase translation for various reasons: structural differences between the two languages, memory limitations (it is more difficult to retain a syntactic structure for which one does not, unlike the speaker, have the semantic blueprint), the need to attend to processing further incoming utterances, and simply the speed needed for lexical retrieval, decoding and encoding. Most importantly, what she produces cannot be deleted, retracted or rechecked against the source utterance and revised, so that a major constraint on her formulation is the need to preserve the greatest possible flexibility for changes of course. Linear or phrase-by-phrase translation so often fails that this strategy is soon forgotten even when it might have been successful (although to the researcher, even this is only apparent with hindsight in the absence of many local environmental clues). Instead, over a long or complex sentence, a simultaneous interpreter waits, stalls, or most often ‘chunks’, producing short self-contained linguistic units that constrain continuations as little as possible syntactically, semantically or pragmatically. It is well known that ‘‘the way information is chunked may in principle help or hinder the search for relevance’’ (Sperber and Wilson, 1995:150). The forced chunking of SI will, therefore, not necessarily coincide with the procedurally optimal arrangement for the listener. Procedural guidance relying on marked word orders in the original, for example, will be disturbed or lost and will have to be compensated for by more locally applicable features like intonation (e.g., contrastive stress). The distance between referents and their antecedents may change, affecting choices of reference (full, reduced, pronominal or elliptical) in the interpreter’s production; she may even have to resort to reminders or repetition if her production separates two items which can then no longer be assumed both to be maximally salient in the audience’s immediate memory. Forced changes in phrase and even clause order will obviously also require reshuffling of connectives which signal logical relationships between preceding and subsequent segments, or pragmatic connectives which indicate which assumptions should be processed together, and so on. Gutt reviews a range of communicative clues, contained in semantic, syntactic, rhythmic, phonetic or formulaic properties of elements in the original text, or in stylistic properties of words like register and connotation, which a translator can try to preserve. International conference discourse is often formulaic, and interpreters strive (and are expected) to have the lexical resources to preserve register, formulas and lexical connotations, up to a cut-off point determined by the predictability of the feature encountered (some formulas are common cliche´s, or are refreshed or acquired during preparation of the conference documents) and the search time available online. This puts proverbs, onomatopeic wordplay and phonological or rhythmic features beyond what can reasonably be preserved in SI, unless the text is provided in advance for preparation. Gutt also includes the category of ‘semantic constraints on relevance’; the example given is pragmatic connectors (Blakemore, 1987). However, as already mentioned, recent relevancetheoretic work has generalized this insight into the recognition of a procedural function in a wider range of syntactic and referential features in language (see, e.g., Wilson and Sperber, 1993). In short, intentional utterances are pervaded through-and-through with procedural guidance. Some elements of this may be picked out as stylistic properties which provide communicative clues,

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and we may identify ‘equivalent’ devices in originals and their translations—such as clefting for emphasis in one language, contrastive stress in another, to take Gutt’s example (1991:126–127). But SI serves to highlight the artificiality of this conception. In any translation, meanings have to be redistributed into new forms, if only because of language differences; in SI, the constraint of synchronicity forces even more recasting. Procedural guidance in speech is intertwined with its structures and word choices; when these are dissolved and recast in another speech and another language, new locally and globally appropriate procedural devices must be injected afresh to go with the new structures, so to speak—a process we have called ‘re-ostension’ (Setton, 1999). The interpreter’s first priority as a communicator, on a par with accurately reproducing logical forms, is to guide her addressees in real time to the contexts in which they can derive the intended effects, bearing in mind their memory spans and inferential abilities. The SI condition may also occasionally force the interpreter into non-interpretive translation. Firstly, in the early stages of a new and unfamiliar meeting, while the shared cognitive environment is still unfamiliar, it is often necessary, and safar, to translate more literally and exhaustively; there is empirical evidence of this in consecutive interpreters’ notes, which are often full and explicit at first but grow much sparser as the meeting progresses. Second, since utterances in SI often have to be started before the local informative intention becomes clear, the interpreter may be forced into a relatively uncomprehending literal translation of the beginnings of utterances, including ‘equivalent’ connectives like ‘Furthermore . . .’ or ‘Needless to say . . .’, a tactic which Lederer calls ‘transcoding’ (Lederer, 1981). There are other cases where neither translators nor interpreters can expect to understand a communication as well as its original direct addressees, and are forced (rather than choosing) to fall back on some degree of direct translation, or simulation, by assembling their utterances meticulously from ‘safe’ lexical, structural and procedural stock equivalents. These are, nevertheless, the exceptions that prove the rule that a translator must choose stimuli to yield the intended effects in the context she projects, rather than for their supposed equivalence relations with the stimuli of the original speech. This follows logically from the two premises that (i) languages differ and (ii) no two stimuli (and indeed no one stimulus impinging on two minds) will ever be processed in identical contexts. Fortunately, the interaction between stimuli and contexts allows for effects close enough to those intended to be reached by different individuals through different inferential routes, to a degree that is good enough for ordinary communication; and no more should be asked of translation. Ultimately, then, an interpreter is entitled to use the interaction of stimuli and context in any way that will deliver adequately similar effects, by whatever inferential route; it makes no sense for her to try to reproduce the communicative clues of the original in a ‘context-independent’ way. Moreover, she deals with varied input, ranging from recited pre-prepared text, sometimes with spontaneous added comments, to mixed-media (graphic, written and oral) material, as in slide presentations—formats which each use their own specific array of attention-getting and procedural devices. An interpreter’s only chance of communicating similar effects at a similar cost in processing effort lies in using the array of such devices proper to her own medium (here, a disembodied voice) and target language. In the case of SI, these are predominantly intonation and discourse connectors, rather than word order and lexical sophistication. At the end of this discussion, we have reached the somewhat paradoxical conclusion that an interpreter should be receptive and subservient with respect to contexts and creative and autonomous in her choice of stimuli. This is less bizarre than it seems when we recall the premises of this position. In accepting her assignment, the interpreter undertakes to appropriate the informative intentions of the speakers she will interpret and make the cognitive effects they

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intended to communicate available to her/their addressees through a different language. The process of understanding a speaker, i.e., of acquiring his informative intention, entails the construction and appropriation by the interpreter of the cognitive environment that he projects. Most of the context in which the secondary addressees process the interpreter’s speech, on the other hand, is generated by that speech itself, which the interpreter must therefore shape in such a way as to compensate for the local distortions forced on it by the simultaneous condition. 5. Translation and interpretation: similarities and differences In the relevance-theoretic account, verbal communication is achieved by inviting an interaction between two variables: verbal stimuli in cognitive contexts. A communicator SP makes an informative intention manifest to one or more addressees A, and offers verbal stimuli S which he can then expect to produce certain cognitive effects E when processed by these addressees in mutually manifest contexts C. Communicators can correctly infer enough about each other’s cognitive environments (manifest contexts) and the effects of verbal stimuli (linguistic conventions and codes) for communication to be adequate, but not perfect. Translation is offered and accepted in the shared belief that the translator (SP1) can comprehend and simulate SP’s informative intention and formulate a different set of verbal stimuli S1 to yield similar cognitive effects E1 in addressees A1. While the stimuli will necessarily be different (in a different language), the contexts, too, can never be identical, so the translator’s ability to produce the same or similar cognitive effects from these changed ingredients is likely to depend on how well she can apprehend or control them. Translators and simultaneous interpreters have different degrees of control over these two parameters. The quality of the verbal stimulus any writer produces depends on her linguistic competence, and also increases her control over the reader’s context, since the effects derived from each utterance form the most immediate initial context for processing the next one: text creates context. A writer/translator has time to compose this stimulus, but her readers also have time to process it in additional contexts over which the writer/translator has less control. But linguistic stimuli also have the power to constrain the search for relevance and bring it to an earlier conclusion. A speaker/interpreter relies on different features of language to constrain the search for relevance, and her listeners have less leisure to extend the contexts beyond those controlled or monitored by the interpreter (the immediate discourse and physical environment). Since contexts are not given but chosen by readers and hearers,4 neither translators nor interpreters can predict in what contexts their productions will be processed; both must do their best to reconstruct and anticipate these potential contexts but also to design their stimulus in such a way as to exploit the principle of relevance and direct their hearers/readers as accurately and economically as possible to the intended cognitive effects, each using the devices appropriate to the format, written or oral. Since linguistic stimuli cannot fully encode the thoughts they are meant to communicate, verbal communicators must rely on representational and computational abilities in their addressees. On balance, it seems that simultaneous interpreters are in a better position than translators to rely on and control the contexts used by their addressees, but because of the processing constraints they work under, they are much less able to craft their stimuli. As outsiders 4 In relevance theory, ‘context’ refers not to the general (‘given’) situation, but to a specific set of assumptions selected by a comprehender while processing incoming utterances, from those most salient and manifest in his/her cognitive environment.

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sharing and contributing to a live communicative event, context is their lifeline. The interpreter does her best, by preparation and documentation, to acquire the residual contexts which will allow her to simulate in her own mind the ‘‘distribution of information that characterises a hearer who has just interpreted one utterance and is about to interpret the next’’ (Sperber and Wilson, 1995:139), including as much as possible of the encyclopaedic contexts which may potentially be used by the audience, or at least, may be assumed by the speaker. To exploit the potential of the live situation, simultaneous interpreters must, therefore, develop a highly specific type of expertise, aimed at reaching temporary ‘cognitive fusion’ with the environment manifest to the participants of the meeting through various means: first, intensive ‘self-priming’ or short-term activation of specific lexical and encyclopaedic entries, and then online, sensory coordination (listening while speaking), resisting cross-linguistic interference, and in particular, certain habits of anticipatory synthesis which probably become irreversible. Beginners’ errors often come of putting too much trust in language, whereas those of professionals more often reflect over-inference or an impatience to make sense, betraying their greater reliance on context. In everyday life, and in written translation, the processes of understanding, analysing (empathising, simulating) and expressing are performed in sequence or in alternation. In simultaneous interpretation, they are fused into a single experience. The task is only possible by establishing a single simulated cognitive environment that in effect becomes the interpreter’s while she is online; there is no room for a separate one of her own. She uses the hierarchy of accessible contexts that this environment presents to her at any time in her search for relevance, both to understand the speaker and to formulate her production in a way that will be maximally relevant for her audience. 6. Evidence, methodology and future research This paper probably contains assertions which may leave readers sceptical where they do not obviously and logically follow from either published or public opinion about language, communication or cognition, and thus, betray their source, at least partially, in the introspection of a professional interpreter and translator. If in this instance, we have been content to offer a theoretical discussion without examples or statistical findings, it is in part because we have addressed the issues within a single theoretical framework, in part also because SI research unfortunately remains stuck in a paradigmatic deadlock, in which one segment of the community is unimpressed by examples from authentic interpreting corpora while another is sceptical of attempts to control variables experimentally in such a holistic activity. If our observations on SI seem plausible, the methodological difficulties should be obvious. While modern techniques like keystroke-logging offer some possibility of reconstructing the processes of written translation, research into the psycholinguistic processes of simultaneous interpretation clearly poses more severe and perhaps insuperable challenges. Transcript analysis reveals some suggestive patterns. Our analysis of the constraints and possibilities of SI predicts that, particularly when a long speech is well underway, formal structural correspondences between source and interpreter’s versions will be rare or coincidental. Some researchers have adduced examples from authentic interpretation of the formal independence of source and target texts in support of arguments similar to those in this paper (Lederer, 1981; Setton, 1999; Chernov, 2004). One can also identify elements in the interpreter’s production which come from more extended contexts, in that they have no plausible source in any element of the original occurring

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upstream within the span of her working memory (Setton, 1999). However, in reconstructing the role of contexts in synchronized corpora we must take into account the effects of language differences and distortions due to the SI condition, particularly the need to start producing before the source utterance is complete. The linguistic ‘distance’ between original and interpretation is also predicted to vary with speech genre—greater in argumentative or polemical discourse, less in ceremonial and flowery material, where an effort is made to produce a stylistically equivalent discourse—and with the stage reached in the communicative event, or within a particular discourse, between the beginnings and ends of utterances. SI may also have some value as a window on speech processing. Comparing input and output at specific points in synchronized SI corpora has already contributed some evidence to support incremental accounts of utterance comprehension. The condition forces some degree of anticipation or guesswork, which an accomplished interpreter can later rectify unobtrusively as an utterance or subsequent discourse unfolds. The nature of the approximations can be shown to draw on tightly interacting semantic and pragmatic processes in a fine-grained incremental way, in other words, an incremental process of mutual adjustment of explicatures and implicatures, rather than, for example, an initial semantically based rendition of ‘what is said’ (or on the basis of linguistically encoded meaning) before a subsequent stage of pragmatic enrichment, or adjustment to ‘what is meant’ (Setton, 1999). Another interesting question concerns the possible limits to SI on discourse requiring higher orders of metarepresentation. Bu¨low-Møller (1999) gives examples of deviations in the simultaneous interpretation of passages involving complex irrealis in political rhetoric in the European Parliament, which Setton (2002) tentatively attributes to the fact that translation, as interpretive use, already entails one order of metarepresentation, so that the interpreter may reach her representational limit earlier than otherwise unstressed listeners. Text analysis software has made available new corpus research techniques. For example, concordancing selected deictics, connectors and marked constructions across multiple translations and interpretations can generate a rich corpus which, if supported by full data about the situation (videos and scripts are often available for European Parliament sessions, for example), might support models of the different effects of stimuli in different immediate and extended contexts, or reveal patterns of misunderstanding or bias; see for example Beaton (in press) on ideological intensification through interpreting in the European Parliament. Experimental methods do not lend themselves easily to exploring the use of context in ordinary utterance interpretation, let alone in as complex and fast-moving an activity as SI. As Sperber and Wilson point out, ‘‘there is no way of controlling which concept someone will have in mind at a given moment. Asking [them] to restrict themselves to explicit, artificially constructed contexts goes so much against natural procedures for context construction that the resulting intuitions are of questionable value’’ (1995:119). However, it should be possible to prime groups of addressees with different contexts, or to withhold specific information from a test group, and conduct subsequent comprehension tests. The success of translation is difficult to verify. Gutt attributes most failures of translation, apart from those due to the translator’s linguistic incompetence, to a mismatch between readers’ expectations and the kind of resemblance aimed at by the translator. In SI, the most obvious failures and breakdowns may occur for a different, but related reason, when communicators require SI to be attempted on inappropriate input, such as monotonous recited, dense, nonredundant written text, especially if it is literary or highly specialized, with no text supplied or opportunity for advance preparation. In normal circumstances, infidelity can only be defined in relevance-theoretic terms as any discrepancy attributable to the translation between the

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cognitive effects intended by the communicator and those derived by an audience—which would obviously be very difficult to pin down. Gutt points out that we can only know that two utterances ‘‘share communicative clues’’ (e.g., that clefting and contrastive effect produce the ‘same effect’ in different languages) by ‘‘checking that the same interpretation is derived in the same context’’ (1991:162). It is not clear how this can be done in practice, and Gutt himself recognizes, with other relevance theorists, that the success of communication can never be verified (personal communication).5 Since translation has not been a laboratory for mainstream research in linguistics, there is little or no theoretical apparatus for evaluating similarity between, for example, the effects obtained by A from stimulus S in contexts C and those obtained by A1 from stimulus S1 in contexts C1. Traditional evaluation methods that rely on some tertio comparationis or on subjective postulates of equivalence between forms cannot verify the success of translation as communication, and in any case will usually reflect the one-sided view of experts. The only evidence we have is indirect, from audience reactions, or in dialogue, from the response of the dialogue partner—both of which must again be interpreted by the researcher. Attempts have been made recently to balance this by polling users of interpretation, but they tend to respond in over-positive and far too general terms, and may reflect ‘accidental relevance’ (Wilson, 2005), which is difficult to detect, particularly in the interpretation of monologues: given simultaneous interpreters’ persuasive abilities, unfaithful interpretation may be perfectly convincing. A more reliable measure of success, though still at low resolution, is possible in the specific case of negotiations that involve multiple parties using different languages and alternating as speakers and listeners, since contradictions and misunderstandings would immediately be apparent (Lederer, 1981). Another interesting line of inquiry concerns the whole area of speaker (in)competence. Incomplete or incompetent stimuli are necessarily interpreted with a greater reliance on inference, and therefore, a greater influence of dominant contexts. This must surely have implications for communication in a world in which many, perhaps most actors on the global stage have to use an acquired rather than a native language, and suggests in particular that new players are likely to find their contributions interpreted within the Procrustean conceptual frameworks crystallized by the international community and global media. In all these cases, simple techniques such as the comparison of speakers’ statements of their informative intentions and addressee’s reports on what they have understood, both between addressees listening directly to the original communicator and those listening through the translation, and indeed between different groups of direct addressees, might be tested and refined to discover patterns of communication and misunderstanding with and without a change of language. 7. Conclusion The advance of English has no more eliminated translation and interpretation than the computer has ushered in the paperless office: the continuing growth in the volume of translation activity worldwide is enough to justify a closer look at the phenomenon. New theories of communication which shift the focus from linguistic stimuli to stimuli-in-contexts help us both to capture the specific cognitive parameters of oral and written translation, and to interface with 5

Lecture delivered at Graduate Institute of Translation and Interpretation Studies, Fujen University, Taipei, in April 2005.

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other areas of cognitive and social science, thus giving translation studies an opportunity to make their contribution to understanding the human epidemiology of ideas, myths and prejudice. References Beaton, Morven. Competing ideologies in the European Parliament: an investigation into the ideological force of recurring isotopic elements in simultaneously interpreted political debate. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, HeriotWatt University, Edinburgh. Blakemore, Diane, 1987. Semantic Constraints on Relevance. Blackwell, Oxford. Bu¨low-Møller, Anne Marie, 1999. Existential problems: on the processing of irrealis in simultaneous interpreting. Interpreting 4/2, 145–168. Carston, Robyn, 2002. Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Blackwell, Oxford. Chernov, Ghelly, 2004. Inference and Anticipation in Simultaneous Interpreting. John Benjamins, Amsterdam. Gerver, David, 1976. Empirical studies of simultaneous interpretation: a review and a model. In: Brislin, Richard W. (Ed.), Translation: Application and Research. Gardner Press, New York, pp. 165–207. Gutt, Ernst-August, 1991/2000. Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context. St. Jerome, Manchester, Blackwell, Oxford. Kahneman, D., 1973. Attention and Effort. Prentice Hall, London. Lederer, Marianne, 1981. La traduction simultane´e. Minard Lettres Modernes, Paris. Setton, Robin, 1999. Simultaneous Interpretation: A Cognitive–Pragmatic Analysis. John Benjamins, Amsterdam. Setton, Robin, 2002. Deconstructing SI: a contribution to the debate on component processes. The Interpreter’s Newsletter 11, 1–26. Sperber, Dan, Wilson, Deirdre, 1986/1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Blackwell, Oxford. Wilson, Deirdre, 2005. New directions for research on pragmatics and modularity. Lingua 11, 5–8. Wilson, Deirdre, Sperber, Dan, 1988. Representation and relevance. In: Kempson, Ruth M. (Ed.),Mental Representations: The Interface between Language and Reality. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 133–153. Wilson, Deirdre, Sperber, Dan, 1993. Linguistic form and relevance. Lingua 90, 1–24 (Special Issue on Relevance Theory, vol. 2, Wilson, D., Smith, N. (Eds.)). Robin Setton is currently Director of the Graduate Institute of Translation and Interpretation Studies (GITIS) at Fujen University, Taipei, and external Professor of interpretation at the University of Geneva. An active conference interpreter and translator since 1979, he has also trained interpreters in Europe and the Far East and served briefly as a member of the AIIC (International Association of Conference Interpreters) training committee. He holds a PhD in applied linguistics and MAs in translation, interpretation and Chinese studies, and is the author of a book-length cognitive–pragmatic analysis of SI and journal articles on cognitive aspects of interpreting.