Complex Syntax/Compression
When speakers use short, declarative sentences and speak at moderate speed, the interpreter's task
is made easier. More complex sentences can Also be interpreted without too much difficulty if
spoken at moderate speed. However, when speakers use long, complex structures and deliver them
at high speed, the interpreter's task is greatly complicated. A lag of a single sentence or phrase can
lead to an omission and inability to catch up. This chapter presents several strategies interpreters
use to help cope with the combined difficulty of complexity and speed.
1 Complex syntax In interpreting a speech, especially a fast speech, it is usually a good strategy
to "simplify the syntax as you go along", breaking up any long and convoluted sentences into
shorter ones, identifying whole ideas or units of meaning, clarifying the relationship between the
sentences (for yourself as well as for the audience), deleting superfluous and/or ambivalent
conjunctions, and organizing lists of items by means of parallel constructions. This is particularly
true when interpreting into English, because clarity, concision, and parallelism are positive stylistic
values in English. There is nothing "elegant" about a complicated run-on sentence in English,
especially if the meaning gets muddled because the speaker or the interpreter has lost track of the
syntax. It is better to get the meaning - or at least most of it - across even i f some "elegant
flourishes" are lost in the process.
2 In order to improve your skill at using the "piece by piece" strategy with complex structures,
try to decide which syntactic cues in the original statement are logically necessary and which are
not. For example, in "I tell down the stairs and therefore have a broken leg" is the word therefore
logically necessary? Isn't the causal link just as obvious if I say "I fell down the stairs and have a
broken leg"? When the logical links between the, parts of a complex structure are self-evident
from the meaning of the past, you are only slowing yourself down and running the risk of
muddling the message if you try to translate all of them.
In this regard, it is important to remember what assumptions you can safely make about the
knowledge of your audience and what actually need to be spelled out for them. If I am interpreting a
speech to an audience of professional physicists and I hear "the theory of relativity, which was
formulated by Einstein", do I need to treat the words “which was formulated by” as a logically
necessary syntactic cue? "Einstein's theory of relativity" will do just as well, will save time, and will
actually sound less patronizing. On the other hand, I might want to spell it out if the audience
consisted of schoolchildren.
Once you have mastered the "piece by piece" strategy, you will sometimes find it easier to interpret
complex structures all in one piece, because you will be more accustomed to deciphering the parts
of the whole puzzle and how they are supposed to fit together, and better able to supply the
necessary syntactic cues in the target language.
7 Ambivalent conjunctions Ambivalent conjunctions placed at the beginning of a sentence can
create problems in interpretation. If the interpreter ascribes the wrong meaning to the
conjunction, the interpretation of the rest of the sentence will turn out wrong, and there will
usually be no way to correct it because there will not be time.
For example, the word "since" may mean (a) from the time when, or (b) due to the fact that.
How is a Spanish interpreter to know whether to begin his sentence with "Desde que. .." or
"Puesto que. .."? Rather than take a 50% chance of being wrong, it is better to delete the initial
conjunction and insert the needed concept at a later point in the sentence:
Since my government began making contributions to this program 20 years ago, we will not
stop supporting it now. = Mi gobierno comenzó a contribuir a este programa hace 20
años; por consiguiente, no cesaremos de hacerlo hoy.
 Since my government began making contributions to this program 20 years ago, it has
scored many successes. = Mi gobierno comenzó a contribuir a este programa hace 20
años; desde entonces el programa ha registrado muchos logros.
(a) Translate the following sentences without translating the initial "since", and dividing
them into more than one sentence if it seems desirable for ease or clarity:
 Since the Middle East peace process was set in motion by the Madrid Peace
Conference in 1991, the Republic of Korea has consistently held the view that peace
cannot be whole without reconciliation between Israel and Syria, and between Israel
and Lebanon.
 Since the Thai Government has long supported the Middle East peace process, the
termination of the state of war between Jordan and Israel, announced in Washington
in July this year, following last year's historic agreement between Israel and the PLO,
gives all of us reason to rejoice.
 Since the success of this first meeting, the ASEAN Regional Forum has become a
viable forum for the promotion of trust as well as political and security cooperation
within the AsiaPacific region.
(b) In the example given above ("Since my government began making contributions ..."), is the
word "since" a logically necessary syntactic cue? Would the meaning be sufficiently clear if the
ambivalent conjunction were omitted altogether, or replaced by a simple "and"? Consider the
following:
 My government began making contributions to this program 20 years ago. We will not
stop supporting it now.
• My government began making contributions to this program
20 years ago, and we will not stop supporting it now.
 My government began making contributions to this program 20 years ago. It has scored
many successes.
 My government began making contributions to this program 20 years ago, and it has
scored many successes. +
(c) Is the "since" in the three sentences given in (a) above logically , necessary in each case?
Enumeration's A structure that can pose problems in both translation and d interpretation is the
"shopping list". The problem arises because the
speaker may or may not use parallel construction in rattling off a long list 0 items, or because
not all of the items may be translatable in the same parallel grammatical form, e.g. with verbs,
nouns, or gerunds, in the target language. The interpreter struggling to maintain the grammatical
parallelism of an enumeration delivered at high speed can easily be thrown off.
It is important to recall that parallelism is only a stylistic requirement .i i i d does not
necessarily affect meaning. But the fact remains that, at least (n English, failure to observe
parallelism produces a very awkwardsounding result. An item in a list that is not grammatically
parallel to the others "sticks out like a sore thumb", for example:
Our agricultural plan includes several new projects:
 building dams
 increasing arable land area
 to build more grain storage silos
 producing more irrigation equipment.
There are several ways to handle shopping lists. Although the main concern is to make sure you
translate all of the items, the translator or interpreter should, ideally, try to preserve parallelism in the
target language even if it is missing from the original. This can often be done, especially when the
speaker announces in advance that he is about to give a list of items, e.g. "In the next five years my
company will shoot for the following seven goals" or "During the Decade to Combat Desertification,
my government will introduce the following five programs."
The introductory sentence or "chapeau" should make it clear that what follows is a list of items.
Then, the interpreter will have some freedom to maneuver, and can, if possible, maintain
parallelism, or, if it is not possible, rephrase the list as necessary. If the parallelism breaks down
half-way through the list, the interpreter can (if time permits) repeat the introductory construction
or resort to using a new sentence or phrase for each item.
10 Compression Human speech can attain speeds of 200 or 300 words per minute and remains
comprehensible even at 500 words per minute. Generally, only excited sportscasters or
auctioneers reach such a rate of delivery, but many normal speakers do tend to speak very fast
in certain situations, e.g. when they have several important points to make and are up against a
strict time-limit. At these inordinate speeds, it is important for an interpreter to do everything
possible to reduce the number of words and syllables the vocal apparatus must produce.
Otherwise, one will fall prey not only to errors of language and meaning but also to errors of
articulation or enunciation e.g. confusing two similarly pronounced words, such as "statesmen"
and "statements".
When high speed of delivery makes it necessary for an interpreter to resort to short cuts or
to "edit" the speech in order to get across the essential elements of the message, certain nonessential items can be deleted, abridged, or treated by short references to what has already been
said at full length. The most obvious candidates for "compression" are the redundant and the
obvious. If a speaker repeats the same point several times in the same passage of his speech, the
redundant repetitions can be deleted or abridged once the point has been made clear. (However,
a final repetition at the conclusion of the speech should not be deleted, since it is meant to
"round out" or "wrap up" the speech.) Redundant adjectives can also sometimes be compressed
with no loss of meaning, e.g. "justo y equitativo" = just. Similarly, an item in a statement which
is a matter of common knowledge or which the interpreter knows is already familiar to the
audience may sometimes be sacrificed when the speaker's speed is such that "something has to
go" and there are other ideas in the statement which are more important or relevant.
Second, resorting to abbreviations or acronyms can reduce the number of syllables one has to
pronounce at high speed. For example, "The Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development" can be reduced to "OECD" (four syllables instead of 20) once the organization has
been identified in the speech. In a speech to physicians about the work of General Practitioners, it
would be acceptable, once that theme has been made clear, to reduce subsequent references to
"doctors" (two syllables instead of seven). Or, in a presentation to an audience of specialists in
Obstetrics and Gynecology, once that nine-syllable theme has been mentioned, shortening
subsequent references to "Ob-Gyn" (two syllables) would be acceptable. One should make an
effort to be familiar with common abbreviations that are widely recognized and save syllables, e.g.
SUV (three syllables) for Sports Utility Vehicle (eight syllables).
General Adverbial Clauses
In general adverbial clause modifies the main verb in the sentence. It is often used to set the
scene for the rest of the sentence. The following two examples are taken from a speech made
by the representative of Belarus at the 48th session of the UN General Assembly. First is a translation following the original phrasing or structure, then the official English translation as it
appeared in the UN Official Records after being interpreted and edited.
Example 1
Original structure: Let us take a look at this experience and potential in those areas which, as is widely
recognized and attested to even by this current debate, have become very important for
preserving world peace and security.
Official English version: Let us take a look at this experience and . potential in those areas
which have become very important for preserving global peace and security, as is widely
recognized and attested to even by this current debate.
Example 2
Original structure: Taking an authoritative position on these issues,Belarus intends to present
during this session of the General Assembly, on behalf of and on the instructions of the states of
Commonwealth of Independent States, a joint declaration of the CIS on issues of the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems.
Official English version: Taking an authoritative position on these issues, Belarus, on behalf of and
on the instructions of the states of the Commonwealth of Independent States, intends during this
session to
present a joint declaration by the CIS on issues of the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
and their delivery systems.
These two passages illustrate a feature which is very important to translators and invaluable to
interpreters: the fact that a general adverbial clause modifying the main verb (also known to
some grammarians an "absolute phrase" because it can stand alone) can be put in any one of
several different positions (regardless of where it appears in the original language) without doing
violence to the meaning. In Example 1 the basic subject-complement structure of the sentence is
"areas are becoming", and in English the general adverbial clause (marked in bold type) could go
before the verb, or after the verb, or even at the end of the sentence, as has been done in the
official version. In Example 2, the basic subjectcomplement structure of the sentence is "Belarus
intends to present a declaration", and the two general adverbial clauses (marked in bold type) could
also go in several different positions, or could be combined together ("Belarus intends, during this
session, on behalf of and on the instructions of ..."), or could even be combined and inserted at
the end in a separate sentence ("We shall do so during this session, on behalf of and on the
instructions of ..."). A short adverbial clause can also be squeezed in between two parts of a
composite verb, as has been done with "during this session" in Example 2 above (between the
auxiliary "intends" and "to present").
Notice that this feature gives one much greater leeway in interpreting than if one were forced to
follow the original sequence of phrases. If the adverbial clause is short, one can slip it in before or
after the verb ("We intend, at this session, to declare ..." or "We intend to declare at this session
...") or place it before the subject ("At this session we intend to declare.. ."). If it is long enough
that leaving it in the middle tends to disrupt the sentence (as in Example 1 above), one can save it
for the end of the sentence. Or, if speed is a problem, one can save it, making an independent sentence
out of the adverbial clause and slipping it in during the speaker's pause between sentences ("We
shall do so at this session.").
Untranslatability
There is a grain of truth to the proverb "Traduttore, traditore". No matter how good the translation,
something always seems to be lost. It is that “untranslatable" residue of meaning that
cannot be brought out in the target language which leads some linguists to proclaim that in a
theoretical sense translation is "impossible". However, it will help the translator or interpreter
to recall that "untranslatability" is chiefly due to the inherent features of cultures and
languages, not to the individual abilities of 'the translator or the limitations of the craft.
The problem of "untranslatability" arises from the fact that different cultures divide up the
universe in different ways, and that their languages therefore contain ideas, words, and expressions
to describe those different concepts and culture-specific features. To cite some familiar examples, the
languages of desert peoples have many words for different aspects of a feature of the
physical world that English speakers simply call "sand", the Inuit language has many words for
"ice", French has many words to describe the qualities of wine (e.g. "gouleyant" and
"charpente"), which cannot be very satisfactorily translated into English, etc.
However, linguists have shown (e.g. with experiments on color preception) that the
vocabulary of our native language only determines what we can say about the world, not whether
we can perceive it. If the word “Ouch” did not exist, an English speaker would still feel
pain when hitting a thumb with a hammer, but the English translator would have one English word
available to translate "Zut!" Consequently, specific realities singled out by the source language
should not be treated as if they were hopelessly unrecognizable to speakers of the target language
simply because speakers of the target language "don't have a word for it". Rather, the interpreter
should try to devise some way of getting the idea across.
In some cases, the problem of "untranslatability" really is insurmountable and the translator, after
scouring through all the dictionaries on the shelf, is finally reduced to leaving the word in the original
language and inserting an explanatory footnote or paraphrase, while the interpreter is reduced to
paraphrasing, describing, keeping the untranslatable world in the original, or skipping the word.
But one must not confuse difficulty with untranslatability. There are many ways to translate words
and expressions that do not travel well from one language to another, and quite often
"untranslatability" is a misnomer, because an exact or complete translation is not necessary, and an
approximate equivalent may be all that is needed in a given context.
Dealing with the problem of "untranslatable" utterances requires one to bear in mind that the same
idea may find expression in different ways from one culture to another. It involves asking questions
like the following: What am I translating? A word? An idea? The name of a concrete object or of an
abstraction? The title of a person? The name of a cultural institution or artifact? A technical term? A
specialized use of an ordinary word? An archaic word? An idiomatic expression? The expression of
an emotion? An image? A figure of speech? A newly-coined term? Should I look for a different part
of speech (e.g. a noun rather than an adjective)? Is there anything in my culture which occupies
roughly the same place or which plays roughly the same role? Is there anything in my culture that is
thought of or talked about in a comparable way? Is the target audience expecting a complete
translation? Does the context or the sub-text make clear the untranslatable implications?
Sometimes an apparent case of "untranslatability" can be solved by finding the equivalent register, or
level of language. For example, the speeches of Winston Churchill might provide a good model to
help you translate a speech by Charles de Gaulle; or, at the other end of the spectrum, American
urban "rap" or old Chicago gangster-slang might provide an equivalent register with which to
translate a French screenplay containing Marseilles "argot du milieu".
Because meaning is largely contextual, the context in which a word appears may at first make the
word seem "untranslatable". But this is often a problem of "not seeing the forest for the trees". The
French word corde may variously mean "cord" or "string" or "rope", but if you are translating the
French expression "Il pleut des cordes", you need not wonder which to choose, because what you are
actually translating is a French colloquial idiom conveying the idea of very heavy rainfall, and the
best translation would be the English or Spanish idiom commonly used in that situation: "It's raining
cats and dogs" / "Llueve a cântaros". In the Spanish expression régimen carcelario the adjective may
at first seem untranslatable because English does not have a special adjectival form corresponding to
the noun "prison" or "jail", but if you focus on the sense of the whole phrase rather than the word,
you can immediately see that the best English equivalent is "police state".
Similarly, equivalents can often be found for seemingly "untranslatable" recent coinages or
neologisms if one pauses to consider the social context in which they are used. If a French speaker
tried to translate the contemporary American coinage "yuppie" by searching for a one-word
equivalent in French, he probably would never find one. But if one asks,What kind of person is a
'yuppie' in America, and what do we call people that in France when we want to poke fun at them?",
one will probhit upon the ironic expressions "jeune cadre dynamique" or possibly “BCBG", both of
which are close enough to the meaning of "yuppie": a young, ambitious, stylish social-climber.
If we look in dictionaries and thesauruses for a one-word English equivalent of the contemporary
Japanese word karoshi ("death from overwork), we will probably not find one. But if we ask
ourselves, "What's phrase we most often use in talking about overworked executives running
themselves into the ground?", we will probably hit upon the term “executive stress", which is weaker
than karoshi but would probably be an adequate translation in most contexts.
In tackling an "untranslatable" word or expression, consider using other parts of speech, or figures of
speech. In an entertaining book about “untranslatable" words, They Have a Word for It (Jeremy P.
Tarcher Inc., Angeles, 1988), Howard Rheingold includes the French word dirigiste. True, the word
itself is not easily translatable by any single English word. Its meaning is so specific that even
English-speaking economists make no attempt to translate it and have in fact adopted it as if it an
English word. Thus, a recent World Bank study on Latin America by an American economist
includes the following sentence: "A particular important issue is ... whether the reforms are likely to
be durable or whether, on the contrary, they are likely to be reversed, plunging Latin America back
into dirigisme, populism, and inequality." Here, the French word dirigisme is apparently being used,
by an English-speaking specialist, because there is no English word that conveys all of the same
nuances. We might therefore be tempted to conclude that the word is "untranslatable". But a
translation or interpretation does not have to use the same parts of speech as the original. If we ask
ourselves what English words are usually used in the context of discussions about government
regulation of business, we find at least one possible equivalent noun phrase: "command economy",
as well as two adjectives, “prescriptive" or "directive", which are fairly close in meaning.