Twenty years have passed since Shlesinger’s (1998) seminal proposal calling for a corpus-based approach to interpreting studies (CIS). Building upon Straniero Sergio and Falbo’s (2012) work aiming to ‘break ground’ in CIS, this volume constitutes a renewed call and presents to the research community more corpus data and methodologies for investigating both interpreting processes and products, far beyond what Shlesinger thought possible.
Chapter 1 by Bendazzoli concerns an overarching framework for CIS and discusses the achievements and challenges of corpus use in three areas of interpreting: research, education and professional practice. Web 2.0 technologies and collaborative work are also proposed to overcome some of the methodological obstacles in creating and using interpreting corpora. Chapter 2 by Bernardini et al. illustrates the challenges in compiling interpreting and intermodal corpora. For instance, it offers a step-by-step guide to audio track transcription, metadata recording, text annotation and text-to-text and text-to-audio/video alignment. It also calls for concerted efforts in establishing a massively multilingual interpreting and intermodal corpus.
The following nine chapters are insightful case studies analysing interpreting corpus data. Chapter 3 by Defrancq and Plevoets deals with cognitive load in interpreting and filled pauses (e.g. uh(m)). Adopting a Bakerian approach, it compares the interpreted and original Dutch corpus data and looks at the effect of interpreting. It finds that higher cognitive load results in a higher frequency of filled pauses in interpreting and hampers lexical access. Similarly, chapter 4 by Wang and Zou engages with the nexus between cognitive load and interpreting focusing on the attributive modifying structures. The study finds that the long and complex front-loaded attributive modifying structures in Chinese are mostly interpreted into back-loaded structures or a mixture of front- and back-loaded structures in English, which requires extra cognitive effort.
Professional interpreters’ language use is the subject of the two following chapters. Chapter 5 by Aston examines the characteristics of interpreter discourse using a corpus of European Parliament proceedings, arguing that interpreters rely heavily on formulaic phraseologies to reduce cognitive processing. The possibility of expanding interpreters’ phraseological repertoire to facilitate fluent interpreting by means of corpora is also discussed. Chapter 6 by Kajzer-Wietrzny describes the functions of the optional complementiser that and compares its use and the zero variant in interpreted, non-native and native English discourse at the European Parliament. It finds that the frequency of the optional that is higher in both interpretese and non-native political speeches than in the English originals, a scenario which is arguably due to the interpreters’ and non-native English speakers’ wish to ensure clarity in communication and their habits of risk avoidance in a formal setting, e.g. the European Parliament.
Chapter 7 by Russo introduces the theme of gender through a quantitative analysis of 200 speeches using the European Parliament Interpreting Corpus. Through investigating aspects such as the speakers’ delivery mode, input speed, language combination and topic, the study finds statistically significant differences between male and female interpreters, thus laying the foundation for more refined qualitative analysis in the future. Chapter 8 by Spinolo examines 1135 figurative expressions in Italian and Spanish and their interpretations in Spanish and Italian extracted from the IMITES corpus (European Commission setting). The study confirms that figurative language is a problem trigger for interpreters. Interestingly, it also finds that professional interpreters prefer to adopt strategies in the following order: translation, paraphrase, substitution and omission.
Chapter 9 by Dal Fovo concerns a corpus-based contrastive analysis of interpreting norms between an interpreting team from the EU Commission and an interpreting team from the Italian national broadcaster Rainews24 when interpreting the same EU presidential debate. By identifying discourse elements in the original speech of the infotainment and focusing on their presence in the two interpretations, this study reveals difference in habitus between the two interpreting teams, highlighting the relevance of context in judging and evaluating interpreting quality.
Chapter 10 by Sandrelli draws on a corpus of simultaneously interpreted press conferences during the UEFA EURO 2008 football championships. It shows that the interpreters sometimes omit the short “squabbles” between the coaches and interviewers and occasionally summarise multiple questions into single ones. The author suggests that an awareness of questioning and answering dynamics is helpful to professional interpreters working in settings featuring constant changes of speakers, fast turn-taking and short duration in each speaking turn. Based on an English-Japanese/Japanese-English simultaneous interpretation corpus, chapter 11 by Neubig et al. adds another perspective to CIS by contrasting translated and interpreted versions of TED talks. This study finds that more experienced interpreters tend to produce interpretation that is more similar to translation, using longer sentences and covering more of the original content. It also suggests the use of corpus data to promote speech translation systems as a promising endeavour.
As CIS is fast coming of age, this book has certainly come at the right time. This sterling volume does what it says on the tin, promising to be yet another milestone that pushes CIS forward. Despite the wide range of linguistic categories and features covered (e.g. interpretese, figurative language, optional that, filled pauses), the book would have benefitted from including corpus-based studies engaging with power and ideology in interpreting, possibly taking a critical discourse analytical approach. Also, as this volume sufficiently attests to (in terms of e.g. corpora established so far, language pairs involved and authors’ institutional affiliation), CIS needs to expand further beyond the traditional epicentres in Europe and more recently East Asia into more diverse geographical locales in order for it to truly make way and become a fully-fledged paradigm.
References
Tao Li
Shanghai Ocean University
E-mail: tli@shou.edu.cn