Interpreting Studies
Evolution
Socio-professional underpinnings
• -Historical background
• -Interpreting was considered too common
to deserve special mention up to the 20th
century.
• -Non-training-based interpreting has been
practiced in various regions and periods in
history; however, it has not been associated
a fixed(professional) status and ‘job
definition’.
• -The first major wave of professionalization
took shape early in the 20th century.
International conference
interpreting 1
• -The Paris Peace Conference in 1919 marks
a turning point: the transition from ‘chance
interpreters’ to the ‘skilled professionals’.
• -As the international demand was growing,
new institutions for systematic training were
set up.
• -The first school was a college for business
translators/interpreters founded in
Mannheim, later transferred to the
University of Heidelberg.
International conference
interpreting 2
• -More schools were established at Geneva
and Vienna in the early 1940s.
• -Simultaneous interpreting was put to the
Nuremburg Trial(1945-6), subsequently
adopted by United Nations.
• -Fostered by an expanding professional
market, national as well as international
professional organizations of interpreters
were set up in the early 1950s.
• -AIIC was set up in 1953.
Interpreting in the community 1
• -Compared to the wave of
professionalization that swept conference
interpreting to high international prestige
after the 1950s, the professionalization of
interpreting in community-based settings
appears more like a pattern of ripples.
• -The strongest historical roots of intrasocial interpreting in courts of law.
• -As late as 1978 in the US, professional
interpreting standards in courts were
established through Court Interpreters Act.
Interpreting in the community 2
• -The significance of legal provisions governing
the use of interpreters is also evident in the
professionalization of American sign language
interpreters.
• -RID(Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf) was
organized in 1965; standards of professional
practice and ethics for its members were
successfully set up.
• -Serving immigrants rather than deaf and
hearing-impaired citizens, spoken-language
community interpreting was pioneered by
countries such as Australia and Sweden.
Interpreting in the community 3
• -Apart from legal interpreting, which is
often viewed as a separate professional
domain, progress in the professionalization
of community interpreting has been
achieved mainly in the field of healthcare.
• -In the US, anti-discriminatory legislation
has been used to promote the employment
of skilled medical interpreters.
• -Little training for interpreters working in
community settings is offered at an
academic level.
Academization 1
• -The high status enjoyed by conference
interpreters since the 1950s is largely due
to a strong market and university-level
training.
• -In the early 1960s CIUTI(the Conference of
University-level Translator and Interpreter
Schools) was organized.
• -Through the time from 1952 to 1968,
pioneering professionals produced the first
textbooks of interpreting.
Academization 2
• -Throughout the 1970s and 1980s conference
interpreter training programs foregrounded the
professional rather than the academic dimension
of higher education.
• -Ever since the 1980s, there has been a trend in
many institutions toward what Mackintosh calls
‘a more theory-friendly curriculum’.
• -CIUTI has come to stress the dual identity of
interpreter education as being both oriented
towards professional practice and guided by
academic research.
Academization 3
• -A tension between the vocational and
academic orientations of T/I schools is
often felt by professionals.
• -Such places like Magdeburg started
offering the BA program for T/I training.
• -Galluaudet University has been offering
the graduate-level degree course for
sign language interpreting.
Breaking ground: professionals
and psychologists
.
1) Pioneers in Geneva and elsewhere 1
• -The Interpreter’s Handbook by Jean
Herbert(the first Chief Interpreter of the
UN); originally appeared in 3 languages
in 1952 and was subsequently published
in several languages; dedicated to Paul
Mantoux(the first conference interpreter)
• -Jean-Francois Rozan: a booklet on notetaking in consecutive interpreting
1) Pioneers in Geneva and
elsewhere 2
• -Early authors above naturally focused on
describing the conference interpreter’s task
as well as the abilities and skills required.
• -Interest in the abilities and skills
mentioned above has been shared by many
psychologists, as early as 1931, Jesus Sanz,
a Spanish psychologist, published a
conference paper on the work and abilities
of conference interpreters.
1) Pioneers in Geneva and
elsewhere 3
• -Aspects of Translation by Roger Glemet
• -Eva Paneth produced a master’s thesis at
the University of London
• -Further profession-building publications
appeared in the course of the 1960s, mainly
in Europe, but also in Japan(1961).
• -Van Hoof produced a comprehensive
monograph on interpreting in 1962.
• -Danica Seleskovitch wrote a seminal article
on conference interpreting in Babel.
2) Experimental psychologists
• -Pierre Oleron, a French psychologist, was
credited with the first experimental study of
simultaneous interpreting.(1965)
• -The first PhD theses on simultaneous
interpreting was completed in 1969 by Henri C.
Barik in the Department of Psychology of the
University of North Carolina.
• -Frieda Goldman-Eisler(British psycholinguist),
Ingrid Pinter(the University of Vienna), David
Gerver(Oxford University) joined this research.
Laying academic foundations
1) Kade and the ‘Leipzig School’
-The most influential pioneer in the
German-speaking area was Otto Kade.
-He defended his doctoral dissertation in
1964, in which he established the
conceptual and theoretical groundwork
for the systematic study.
2) Chernov and the ‘Soviet School’
• -The ‘Soviet School’ of interpreting research
was represented chiefly by Ghelly V.
Chernov at the Maurice Thorez Institute of
Foreign Languages in Moscow.
• -He engaged in a research effort in
cooperation with psychologist Irina
Zimnyaya and conducted an experiment on
the role of predictive understanding in
simultaneous interpreting.
3) Seleskovitch and the ‘Paris
School’ 1
• -Danica Seleskovitch appeared as a highly
prominent Western counterpart of Eastern
Kade and Chernov.
• -She started teaching in the late 1950s,
published a seminal book in 1968,
completed his doctoral thesis on notetaking in consecutive interpreting in 1973.
• -At the University of Paris/Sorbonne
Nouvelle, she managed to establish a
doctoral program as early as 1974.
3) Seleskovitch and the ‘Paris
School’ 2
• -The theoretical and methodological approach to
the study of interpreting and translation established
at ESIT proved fertile ground for a number of
doctoral dissertations on interpreting, most notably
by Karla Dejean le Feal, Mariano Garcia-Landa and
Marianne Lederer, all completed in 1978.
• -Only the conference interpreting issues used to be
the Paris-dominated mainstream for the time being.
• -Such scholars like Richard Brislin and Robert Ingram
made an appeal for the other areas of interpreting
like sign language interpreting, or sociological and
social psychological studies of interpreters and their
roles.