THE TEACHER AS SETTER OF PROFESSIONAL NORMS. SOME THOUGHTS ON
QUALITY AND QUALITY ASSESSMENT IN SIMULTANEOUS INTERPRETATION
by Sergio Viaggio, United Nations Office at Vienna
Birds need a genetic mutation to improve their effectiveness at flying or
nest-building. We, interpreters, are more modest: all we collectively
require to improve our mediating ability is a deeper insight into our
discipline, i.e. a better theory adroitly applied - a better theory that will
allow us better to see and assess quality and, therefore, more efficiently to
strive for it ourselves or help others achieve it.
The chasm between professional and expectancy norms
As teachers, our role is to transform natural talent into professional ability, i.e. into quality
professional practice; as evaluators and examinators it is to assess our students' performance
against our own quality standards: we decide what counts as quality. We are thus contributing to
setting professional norms - the norms against which we, professional interpreters, judge our
own, our colleagues' and our students' performance. More often than not these professional norms
are at loggerheads with expectancy norms - the norms against which the layman assesses us1. The
difference between translation/interpretation and better established professions is that in the latter
case expectancy norms have become based on professional norms, so that, for instance, no
patient will question the surgeon's "right" to amputate, provided it is the best alternative under the
circumstances - best for the task at hand, i.e. doing what is best for the patient. The reason for this
chasm is socio-historical: physicians, architects, engineers and other professionals have
scientifically, practically and therefore socially established themselves as experts in their field;
and in so doing they have earned the trust of users of their services, who, at worst, are willing to
give them the benefit of the doubt. This they have managed through centuries of actually striving
to grasp more and more thoroughly the laws objectively governing relevant phenomena, and ever
more effectively putting them to practical use. As a consequence, their scientific competence (i.e.
theoretical, declarative knowledge) informs their professional performance (i.e. their practical,
procedural knowledge) thereby ensuring its validity. The most obvious social consequence of this
is that their diplomas are recognised and protected, and that, through their professional
organisations, they have the right to regulate both access to the profession and professional
practice.
1
Chesterman refers to norms as the kinds of behavioural regularities that "are accepted (in a given community) as
being models or standards of desired behaviour" (Chesterman 1993, p. 4). He distinguishes two broad pairs of norms:
On the one hand, there are production norms - having to do with methods and processes, and product norms - having
to do with the form and end-results of processes. On the other, users of interpretation (and translation) have certain
expectations about the product of our work - they have expectancy norms. We, interpreters have certain principles
that guide the way we arrive at such a product and set the quality standards for it - we have professional norms, a
synthesis of our own production and product norms. Every profession is governed by professional norms.
-2Interpreters have not yet collectively succeeded in theorising their praxis, and have yet to
establish themselves and the profession to a similar extent, which makes them feel much more at
the mercy of their users than other professionals. This is an objective vulnerability: Although they
do normally have the linguistic and thematic competence necessary for effecting most meaning
(i.e. basically semantic) transfers adequately, practitioners generally lack the declarative
competence to ensure the communicative validity of their performance. It is here, at the
metalinguistic, communicative level --the mediator's highest instance-- that the interpreter's
"right" to improve or otherwise "tamper with" the original is posed. Yet, we unhappy few know
that making the linguistic, terminological, stylistic, rhetorical, cultural and other adjustments in
the second speech act2 that completes the communication circuit between the speaker and the
interpreter's audience is neither a "right" nor a "duty" but an unavoidable necessity, since the
relevant identity between sense as intended by the sender and sense as comprehended by the
addressee is impossible without at least some degree of adaptation at all levels. The question,
then, is not whether but to what extent and in what circumstances the interpreter can legitimately
improve or fail to improve, adapt or fail to adapt his verbalisation of sense, i.e. without
overstepping the deontological boundaries of loyalty (Nord 1991, Viezzi 1996). The answer
cannot but be based on the best knowledge available about the social and physical rules
objectively governing communication. Thus, the kind of declarative knowledge necessary to
understand what kinds of adaptations in the second speech act are necessary, and of procedural
knowledge to come up with the best possible communicative product under the circumstances,
goes far beyond the purely linguistic and thematic competence that all too many practitioners
assume to be sufficient. Without such declarative buttress, even the best intuitions fail to assert
themselves procedurally, whereby professional norms remain naive.
2
I shall use the expressions "act of speech" and "speech act" indifferently, not in the Searlian sense, but as any act of
communication through speech.
-3The main difference between scientific and naive professional norms revolves, then,
around the interpreter's role, responsibility, freedom and loyalty as an interlingual intercultural
mediator. As such, he is there to help communication actively, not to stand by indifferently or,
worse, in the way: His deontological responsibility towards both (sets of) interlocutors and
whomever has hired him goes far beyond aptly decoding semantic representations from one
language and faithfully encoding them in another. Effective mediation requires awareness of
several phenomena crucial to human communication. Practitioners cannot help communication
effectively it they fail to see or fully take into account that sense does not depend on the speaker
alone; that it is equally constructed by the addressee through a process of inference based on the
principle of relevance (Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995)3; that a text is but an extended semantic
explicature, which can only become an effective message once the addressee has been able, in the
specific social situation, to infer the relevant implicatures and to derive the relevant cognitive and
affective contextual effects - which are not linguistic and have nothing to do with semantics.
From the communicative standpoint, the interpreter's communicative loyalty, therefore, is both to
the sender and to the addressee, although in different circumstances it may shift more towards
either; in fact, "faithfulness to the original" is but the most obvious form, not of equal, but of
indifferent loyalty to both interlocutors. It can be asserted that the mediator is not responsible for
the sender's intended sense, or for the original utterance's semantic or stylistic adequateness to it
(i.e. for the sender's ability or willingness to make himself understood); nor for the addressee's
willingness or ability to understand - but this is not always the case. Indeed, in certain situations a
good mediator is normally able to help both protagonists, so that the sender can tailor his
verbalisation more and more accurately to the interlocutor's linguistic and cultural competence,
and the interlocutor can hone his sensitivity to the sender's. This a good practitioner can achieve
in two complementary ways: By making both interlocutors (or, at least, the more sophisticated
one) aware of any mismatches in culture, knowledge or expectations as well as of the possible
remedies, and/or by himself effecting the necessary adaptations in his own rendering. What
prevents many practitioners from understanding that, unless there are political, legal or other
valid reasons not to, he must do his best to help both interlocutors actively is, thus, a
misconception of interpretation as a sheer exercise in interlingual transfer, whereby loyalty to the
interlocutors is mistakenly equated with faithfulness to the original's form, whether at the
semantic, syntactic or lexical levels.
In earlier times (and in some quarters, unfortunately, to this day) the interpreter, unaware
of the true nature of his role, unsure of his own linguistic and social competence, saw the speaker
or the client as his despot; nowadays, a professionally competent mediator should fear nothing
aside from being unable to do a linguistically and culturally competent job - or incapable of
explaining and defending scientifically any contested choice. In some instances, to be sure, the
mediator must be unconditionally loyal to one of the participants, and this loyalty may well entail
maximum faithfulness to formal features, including semantic form. But even in such cases, his
professional expertise should not be questioned or superseded. In the end, it is a matter of
bringing expectancy norms up to professional norms rather than have the latter subserviently
accommodate the former4. This is a long, uphill battle of self-assertion, for professional, social
and personal dignity - and, by short extension, for proper remuneration.
3
4
Regardless of whether the computational process postulated by the authors actually takes place or not (see Toolan 1998).
In this respect, I fully subscribe Simeoni's 1998 observations on habitus. I find his insightful article an indispensable
complement to this paper (or, perhaps, the other way around).
-4The García Landa-based model of interlingual intercultural mediation
Before proceeding any further, I shall briefly describe my development of García Landa's model:
The speaker proceeds to engage in an act of speech out of a conscious motivation, itself a product
of the deeper realm of the unconscious, i.e. he has a conscious and/or unconscious skopos. Such
motivation can be explained summarily as a wish to modify or consolidate a state of affairs in the
world and one's own or somebody else's position in it. The motivation may be more or less
directly connected to the actual form and content of the utterance: there may be little or no
connection between the deep motivation and the surface utterance (see Viaggio 1998). As he
begins to utter, the speaker has a main and a constellation of secondary pragmatic intentions, i.e.
the actual effect that he intends his act to have there and then5. What he specifically wishes to
convey through a speech act is a speech-informed perception - an amalgam of cognitive and
affective content and both linguistic and nonlinguistic speech signs that he must now reduce to
sensorial stimuli that can reach his interlocutor. This perception is a function of a cognitive
background that determines the relationship between meaning meant and meaning linguistically
encoded - or, much more simply, between sense and meaning. In actual fact, the stimuli produced
and received are nothing but acoustic and optic wavelength differences. What counts for our
purposes, however, is that the speaker manage to reduce his speech-informed perception to a
perceivable semiotic chain and that the interlocutor manage in turn to derive from it another
speech-informed perception. The main, often decisive semiotic element, of course, is linguistic:
The speaker produces a chain of linguistic signs that is basically characterised at four levels phono-morpho-syntactic, semantic, prosodic and register. These signs he chooses more or less
consciously from and according to established systems that gravitate upon them in his mind.
Such systems are normally all immediately recognisable as conventional, belonging to a given
language or lect, but it need not be the case: Out of ignorance or intentionally, the speaker may
Amix@ systems or apply them imperfectly - as is the case, for instance, with small children,
foreigners and impersonators. But there are two additional sources of sensorial semiotic stimuli:
The first one is also acoustic - except that it is paralinguistic (elocutional) rather than linguistic;
the other is visual - that of the speaker=s kinesics (body language and facial expressions). Both
these stimuli are consciously or unconsciously used to convey mostly pragmatic information:
anger, irritation, conviction or excitement need not be spelled out semantically. Regardless of the
speaker=s intention, the interlocutor=s comprehension will depend heavily on these nonlinguistic
stimuli. All three: language, paralanguage and kinesics or their graphic counterparts (see Viaggio
1997), are part and parcel of speech as a Gestalt, and that is why, following García Landa, I speak
of speech-informed perceptions rather than linguistic perceptions (they exist too, and are a
component of the higher-order speech perceptions - the way "texts" are a feature of higher-order
acts of speech). The speech act takes place in a specific social situation, at a specific historic time
and, within it, at a specific moment. The situation is the mise en scene of communication, upon
which gravitate, on the one hand, the relevant world: the bar, the class, the lecture, the
"hypertext" (Pöchhacker 1994), that activate specific frames, scripts and scenarios, and, on the
other, the whole weight of the life-experience of all or each of the participants, i.e. culture in its
widest possible sense.
5
Or, perhaps, elsewhere and later, as when a politician speaks pour la galerie - in which case his real addressees are not
his interlocutors there and then; a fact that -I am told- does not escape euro-parliamentarian interpreters who very often
just let the MP blabber away at any speed.
-5At the other end of this act is the interlocutor who receives those stimuli and converts
them into a speech-informed perception. This he does through the powerful filters of his
conscious and/or unconscious willingness or resistance to understand - his own conscious and/or
unconscious skopos. Once past this psychological custom's house, in order to turn the stimuli into
his own speech-informed perception, the interlocutor resorts to his knowledge of the different
linguistic and nonlinguistic signs and systems used by the speaker, and his own relevant cognitive
baggage.
Thus we have a consciously and unconsciously motivated speech-informed perception
leading to another consciously and unconsciously filtered perception. If there is no such
perception at the other end, communication has not been established; in order to succeed,
however, establishing communication is not enough. I submit that communication has succeeded
if and when the interlocutors have achieved the relevant identity of their respective perceptions n.b.: not similarity or equivalence, but identity; not logic or mathematical identity either, but
perceptual identity: In order to have succeeded in communicating with each other, both the
speaker and his interlocutor must perceive the same Athing@ in its relevant aspects. We speak of
perceptual identity to refer to the relationship established between a perception and its object6. In
the end, this identity is a function of how much of that relevant linguistic, cognitive baggage is
shared by the protagonists of the act of speech and how willing they are to understand each other
(what Toolan 1996 calls mutual orientedness).
Quality in simultaneous interlingual intercultural mediation
Strictly speaking, then, in order for communication to be successful all that is required is that a)
the perception that the speaker intends to transmit through his act of speech and b) the perception
that the interlocutor derives as a result of analysing and synthesising the sensorial stimuli be
relevantly identical (i.e. identical in all relevant aspects). But success at communicating and
communicative efficiency and quality are different concepts: Good communication is optimally
efficient communication - one that achieves the best immediate results with minimum effort.
Since communication is established between different subjects who may or may not be equally
able and/or willing to make themselves understood or to understand, and who may have more or
less diverging skopoi, efficiency and quality are relative to each of the participants in a specific
situation. This is an essential fact: both speaking and listening are purposeful activities every bit
as much as interpretation; they too are to be seen from the perspective of action theory. As García
Landa rightly observes, translating is but a special way of speaking (i.e. of talking and listening) a special way of reproducing an apprehended perceptual space through the production of a new
formal space (1984:64-66). This fact has hitherto eluded most models of translation: speaking,
interpreting and listening are governed by the same principles of speech production and
reception, communication and action. Their success and degree of quality, therefore, must be
basically measurable on the same terms.
6
Let me explain what such identity is: You and I both see the pencil you have in front of you from different angles and
distances; maybe you are daltonic and cannot make out its colour; but both you and I see the same pencil. In this sense and
despite their differences, our perceptions are, nevertheless, relevantly identical. On the other hand, If I ask you for the red
pencil -which, you, as colour-blind, cannot tell from the green one next to it- our perceptions are no longer relevantly
identical and communication cannot prosper. In order for it to succeed, we must find perceptual identity through some
other means (viz, that I ask you for the long pencil, or the one on your right, etc.). This is what normally happens in
everyday communication: little by little we correct our aim until we finally hit that target which is the identity between the
intended and the derived perceptions.
-6Whether mediated or not, interlingual or monolingual, then, good communication starts
by being successful communication - there cannot be any more basic criterion; but the fact that an
act of interpretation has succeeded is not enough for us to say that the interpreter has provided a
good interpretation. First, we must recall that the responsibility for communicative success may
fall unevenly on either participant: a doctor, mother, teacher, adult are respectively more
responsible for understanding a patient, child, student or infant than the latter are for
communicating expertly. From this perspective, a good understander is someone who will
manage to understand most people (and not only Awhat they are saying@) in most circumstances
regardless of the rhetoric or linguistic ability of the communicator. On the other hand, a good
communicator is someone who will succeed at communicating with most people under most
circumstances - someone who has a special ability to get the message across, whatever the ability
or predisposition of his interlocutors. Vermeer points out that a good translator, strives at optimal
"text-design" according to the intended skopos and recipients: it is not enough to be just
"understandable" (Vermeer 1998:58). By the same token, we can add, a good translator (and for
us, a good communicator) is someone who will always perceive the speaker's communicative and
other intentions no matter how inept the "text-design" is: it is not enough just "to understand".
As a mediator, therefore, the interpreter must be first and foremost an expert understander
of speech acts, i.e. of motives, intentions and utterances. It is precisely for this purpose that he
needs passive linguistic, cultural and encyclopaedic knowledge and maturity7; and he must be an
expert at being understood - which, besides maturity and active linguistic, cultural and
encyclopaedic knowledge, requires the ability to mediate effectively. If both the speaker and the
addressee are co-responsible for communication's success and efficiency, then the interpreter --as
both an interlocutor to the speaker and a speaker to the addressee is "doubly co-responsible": All
other things being equal, the success of communication depends more on him than on either
interlocutor, since he is a specialist in mediation, i.e. at understanding other people, analysing
their motives, intentions and utterances, adapting his own speech-act production, and making
other people understand.
Quality in interpretation is thus quality in the (re-)production of a speech perception
through a new act of speech, and is to be sought and assessed at all relevant aspects, including but
not limited to the textual level. When it comes to comparing the speaker's and the interpreter's
speech acts, collating original and translated utterances makes only partial --if by no means
negligible-- sense. If we do not seek quality above the "textual" level, we are ignoring many
questions that, from a socially relevant point of view, are often more important than what a
speaker is actually saying: Why does he want to say something to begin with? What is he trying
to do with what he is saying? How well is he succeeding at doing it? Why has he chosen to speak
to this interlocutor, in this fashion, here and now? Only within this framework does it make sense
7
It is clear that expertise at understanding and making oneself understood by specific people in specific circumstances,
despite linguistic, cultural, psychological, political and other barriers, goes well beyond understanding and being able to
speak languages, but demands intellectual and experiential maturity: One cannot really expect to come across truly
competent mediators at a very young age. This essential maturity requirement lies behind the assertion that interpretation
should be a post-graduate academic endeavour. Indeed, if interpretation is taken for what it really is, namely the most
demanding form of mediated intercultural interlingual communication from the cognitive and psycho-motor point of view,
then there is no reason why interpreters should be churned out in two to four years by the hundreds, with no intercultural
experience and existentially and intellectually immature. But then there is no reason either for them to have to acquire such
maturity studying something at best marginally relevant to mediating: If physicians are not expected to mature elsewhere in
academia, why then interpreters? Let interpreting be a post-graduate course at a school of interlingual intercultural
mediation, not just an afterthought to other pursuits.
-7to ask what the speaker is saying and how aptly. Empirically, of course, a listener starts from the
sensorial linguistic and nonlinguistic stimuli and works his way "up" and "back" to the
fundamental queries. As a professional listener, the interpreter has a professional duty to retrace
the same steps; because he, too, must speak; and his act of speech is clearly governed by the same
factors: He too must have a motivation and an intention to say something to someone in a certain
way. In this light, in order to assess the quality of a given interpretation the following questions
should be systematically posed: 1) Were the speaker's intended speech perception and the
motives behind his speech act relevantly understood? 2) Was the mediation's skopos well chosen
both deontologically and communicatively? 3) Were the objective circumstances expertly taken
advantage of or compensated for? 4) How effectively was the task accomplished? (Only the
second question, that of the specifically "mediatorial" skopos is specific to the interpreter, but
since it governs all his communicative choices, it is fundamental.) The last question can be
decomposed a) into the linguistic and nonlinguistic elements of elocution, and b) into the
communicative and the pragmatic choices informing the reproduced perception in the new speech
act. It is only here that the formal features of the interpreter's own "text" and its relationship with
the original utterance --i.e. any concept of "equivalence"-- become relevant. In this respect, it
stands to reason that an interpreter who is not adept at understanding and communicating
spontaneously will hardly understand and communicate effectively in a booth.
Quality, moreover, also has a strictly technical side, having to do with the ability to cope
with drastic or even unsurmountable limitations and obstacles, both objective and subjective:
exhaustion and stress; poor physical and social working conditions (especially poor sound
quality); speed, accents, lack of perspicuity; arcane subjects and vocabulary; metalingual uses;
etc. As these have been more widely discussed in the literature, I shall not dwell upon them here.
Pedagogical consequences
Initially, all of the different abilities required for the diverse quality components must be
developed, practised and evaluated separately; but in the end, mediation is a Gestalt, therefore
quality is to be ascertained globally. Fostering comprehensive mediating quality demands that a
student be given --and, eventually, be expected to ascertain adeptly on his own-- all factors
relevant to the imaginary situation he is supposed to be mediating in. For this, the specific skopos
of every single exercise should be clear. In the end, quality must be assessed against well
established specific situational parameters, which include the speaker, his audience and the
interpreter himself8. In order for our teaching to be effective, we must seek to establish a
pedagogically relevant typology that will allow us to explain and assess different strategic and
tactical options - a typology that will allow our students a) to determine when it is necessary,
advisable, mandatory, unnecessary, ill advised or disloyal to retain, add, omit, condense, abstract,
change or adapt, on the basis of relevance for the specific task in hand under the specific
objective and subjective circumstances, obstacles and limitations; and b) to do it expertly. This is
not a "technique" of simultaneous interpretation, and it cannot be learnt "technically", by merely
exercising with tapes and/or speeches. Although practising in a social vacuum with isolated
speeches can be very useful, since it helps tackle all manner of technical difficulties, it is not
what mediating is really about. It should always be made crystal-clear that there is much more to
good interpretation than reflexes and linguistic ability. If the student is not trained as a mediator,
8
As suggested by Viezzi 1996, but from the standpoint of the totality of the speech act(s), to which the quality criteria he
proposes (equivalence, accuracy, appropriateness and usability) are subordinate.
-8if texts are never given in the context of hypertexts, i.e. if the social aspect of the profession is
left to the haphazard avatars of individual practice, schools are doing their students a disservice
abutting on criminal negligence.
Unfortunately, even we, theoreticians and teachers, remain subliminally hostage to an
obsolete all-powerful habitus that stands in the way of applying our best theoretical thinking: We
forget that the interpreter is not necessarily the speaker's lips; that he mediates between the
speaker's lips and the addressee's ears, or rather, between them as people - as subjects producing
and exchanging speech-informed perceptions in a specific social situation, within the general
social production and exchange of goods, services and models of the world. More than mere
declarative awareness, we need to have the visceral certainty that the interpreter is there to ensure
effective communication, i.e. relevant perceptual identity between two subjective, individual or
collective, poles; that if such relevant identity is achieved, interpretation has been successful regardless of the involuntary mistakes or awkwardness of expression, or voluntary or involuntary
omissions, additions or adaptations; that any cases of literalness or semantic completeness,
omissions, additions and adaptations actually add to an interpretation's quality if they help the
interlocutors save processing effort incommensurate with the cognitive and affective contextual
effects that they would have otherwise derived, and that they detract from it if they increase the
processing effort of the interlocutors without a matching increase in contextual effects; that,
therefore, the more fluid and effortless communication becomes thanks to the interpreter's
mediating effort, the better the interpretation; that an interpretation's success or failure is always
to be measured here and now, for these speakers, under these circumstances; that any
interpretation that does not help achieve relevant perceptual identity between what is meant and
what has been understood has been unsuccessful, i.e. useless; and that a useless interpretation is,
by definition, poor. Only then will we be able to set scientific professional norms for our students
to measure up to, thereby forming a better generation of mediators, who will pick up the torch
from us and be able to carry it ever further.
The evaluators's profile
Who is in a better position to judge such socially and situationally conditioned communicative
quality? If we wish to determine whether a cardiologist is good, whom do we ask? The surviving
patients? When it comes to assessing our own professional quality, our clients are possibly just as
unreliable. Like physicians, we need expert peers, but we need something in addition: As Lederer
1981 crucially remarks, quality in interpretation is grasped by ear. As with all kinds of oral, faceto-face communication, it is immediate intelligibility and effect that count. It is difficult to assess
interpretation on its own when immediate reference to the original, coupled with repeated
comparative hearings, remains possible. For this reason, I find it essential that any panel
evaluating quality include expert interpreters who act as net users (i.e. who are objectively unable
to understand the original or to have access to it as the interpretation is delivered), able to
combine their theoretical baggage and the attentive innocence of a user. We need truly expert
colleagues who, for instance, could be called upon to relay from a candidate - perhaps the keenest
critics. Such a virgin expert is not the only one able to appraise an interpretation, but his
unadulterated opinion (unadulterated by post mortem analysis) is indispensable in order expertly
to assess prima facie quality. For this reason, his opinion ought to be elicited first, so as not to be
tainted by forensic observations on faithfulness and completeness, however legitimate and
justified they may be9. Ideally, divergencies among evaluators should be limited to matters of
9
In order to assess the degree of difficulty of any given test, moreover, one or two jurors must have attempted it
-9high-level theorising or of taste. However, until a general model of mediated interlingual
intercultural communication is assimilated and agreed upon by most practitioners and, especially,
teachers, this goal will remain elusive. In the meantime, it is essential that there be at least
conceptual agreement about relevant parameters and aptness criteria.
These are but ideas and suggestions aimed at helping to develop, systematise and
hierarchically organise different criteria against which quality can be measured at specific stages
of professional expertise - from admission tests and graduation exams at interpretation schools to
aptitude tests for different levels of professional practice. Perhaps the most important corollary of
the fact that quality is measured against norms and of the gap between scientific professional
norms and the naive norms of practitioners ignorant of developments in our discipline is that
schools ought to be equally obsessive about screening out ill-endowed students and theoretically
ignorant or backward didactitians. Although it is essential, it is not enough to be a recognised
practitioner: If quality is in the ear of the evaluator, then we need extremely keen evaluators who
are able to take stock of and fairly assess the relevant aspects of a student's performance.
themselves, so as to be able to evaluate the student's performances against their own. This is, of course, a difficult issue,
since none of us would enjoy being outclassed by our own students... and it can happen.
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.
--(Forthcoming) "Towards a More Systematic Distinction Between Context and Situation
& Sense and Intention", to be published in Rivista Interanzionale di Tecnica della
Traduzione 4.
--(Forthcoming) "El modelo de García Landa-Viaggio de la mediación interlingüe
intercultural aplicado a la interpretación".
VIEZZI, Maurizio: (1996) Aspetti della qualità in interpretazione, Universitá degli studi di
Trieste, Scuola superiore di lingue moderne per interpreti e traduttori, Trieste, 146
pp.
- 14 ANNEX I
THE GARCIA LANDA/VIAGGIO MODELS
a. The model of the act of speech (a general model of verbal communication)
García Landa's models of verbal communication and translation (initially formulated in his 1978
doctoral thesis and published in 1990 and 1998) are, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive,
refined and rigorously formalised to date. Lately we both have been developing them and
synthesising them in mediation model. The versions discussed below are the latest.
Every act of human communication, whether speech-informed or not, is an exchange of
mental perceptions. In the case of verbal communication, the perception that is conveyed is
mediated and informed by speech and articulated in linguistic signs. In any written or oral
speech-act what is communicated is an intended speech-informed perception (espacio
perceptual hablístico intendido or LPI) - a mental representation that is the result of perceiving
that which one wishes to convey as a synthesis of thought and speech. Communication is
achieved as long as the receiver manages to generate in his mind a comprehended speechinformed perception (espacio perceptual hablístico comprendido or LPC) that holds an identity
relationship with the one intended. If this identity is achieved, communication has succeeded regardless of the means or language(s). If, on the other hand, it is not, then communication has
failed, in spite of the interlocutors' or the mediator's competence and effort. According to this
concept, language (materialised in different languages) is but an organising mechanism for
speech, which, far from being reduced to it, largely transcends it. Speech itself is a social
sensorial vehicle - more often than not decisive, but nothing more. Thus, mental perceptions and
linguistic signs are ontologically different notions - as are linguistic chains and utterances (i.e.
language and speech). Through semantic representations, linguistic signs weld a mental
perception and speech (for some 250 milliseconds); the semantic potential crystallised in the
semantic representations is the semantic form of the mental perception, and, together with the
other forms (morpho-syntactic and phonic) constitutes the linguistic form of the LPI, whose
content is meaning meant, i.e. sense. This perceptual identity, as a socially relevant
commonality of features between intended and comprehended LPs, is at a higher level than
equivalences or similarities at the utterance or textual levels - including the level of semantic
representations (as when metaphor is reduced to sense or vice-versa). According to our concept,
language is but an organising device for speech, which in turn is but a social perceptual sensorial
vehicle.
In our model, every speech act is governed by a main pragmatic intention and several
secondary pragmatic intentions, themselves governed in turn by a conscious motivation that ends
up diluting itself in the miasma of an unconscious motivation. In order for communication to
succeed, it is not necessary (it may be even self-defeating) that the interlocutor grasp the
pragmatic intention, the conscious motivation or, above all, the unconscious motivation behind
the utterer's act (otherwise, manipulation would be ineffective) - decisive though these elements
are in the production of any act of speech. What is truly relevant instead is that the speech act
aptly function according to the kind of reception that the utterer wishes to achieve and/or the
addressee expects: that it duly inform, move, convince, prompt, amuse, bore, etc. A text's or
utterance's functionality is thus a synthesis between the speaker's or the addressee's skopos and
verbalisation. Conscious motivation, unconscious motivation, main pragmatic intention, and
secondary pragmatic intentions are the motors of the speech act itself, and are therefore
independent of the semiotic system that they draw on.
- 15 In its present form, the model can be summarised as follows:
1) Every act of speech D (whether oral V, written T, or interiorised I) in a given language
o is a social transaction whereby someone (the subject of production), out of a conscious
motivation W, governed by an unconscious motivation Z, with a main pragmatic intention Y
and secondary pragmatic intentions y, perceives, as the object of his intentionality and wishes
to produce in his interlocutor an LPI which is a part of a given set of pre-comprehension
schemes, knowledge base or passing theories K.
2) To that effect, he sets in motion a complex mental operation which involves mainly
constructing and presenting to his interlocutor(s) a finished social product which is a sign chain
F in such language o. Such chain consists of a) a phono-morpho-syntactic structure X
(actualising a certain phono-morpho-semantic system L); b) a semantic potential S (actualising
a semantic system H); c) a rhythmico-prosodic structure V (actualising a rhythmico-prosodic
system R); and d) a register J (from a register series Q). This chain is also necessarily
accompanied by a series of suprasegmental (paralinguistic or typographical) features C, and
kinetic or graphic features E that reinforce, nuance or modify its sense. (In face-to-face
communication, then, the stimulus triggering the comprehension process consists of three
components: F, C and E, although the latter one is lost in strictly acoustical communications such
as radio, telephone, etc., often making comprehension --and interpretation!-- more difficult.)
3) The speech act is carried out in a given social situation or socio-historical field G
governed by a system of beliefs, norms and practices, or a certain life and personal
experience P, within a given relevant world M, at a historic moment VH, and, within that
moment, at a specific time t. (All components are characterised by specific set of features m, n,
etc.).
4) Someone else (the subject of comprehension, who more often than not is the same
person playing both roles, i.e. communicating with himself), is listening and understanding in a
complex mental operation which results in his producing in turn a perception of the same object
that the speker perceieved as object of his intentionality - an LPCo, which is a propositional
or perceptual component, both cognitive and affective, of the same knowledge base K. (This base
is not a "fact": It gravitates upon actualised facts; it consists of elements activable and activated
in the speech act thus enabling communication, since what ultimately makes it possible is shared
knowledge.) In order to do so, he must resort to or overcome his conscious or unconscious
motivation or resistance U and Z. We should stress the active nature of comprehension, whereby
the comprehender (re-)constructs his speech perception of the speaker's meaning meant retroapplying his own filters U, Z and K to the acoustic/optic stimulus [FCE].
Communication will have succeeded in so far as perceptual identity is achieved between
what the speaker wants to convey (LPI) and what the comprehender has understood (LPC) otherwise it will have failed to a greater or lesser degree. Since neither perception is open to
observation, such identity is often impossible to verify empirically: it can only be postulated. This
is not a drawback of our model but an inescapable empirical fact.
Depending on one's purpose, the semantic representation could be seen either as SmH or
as the combination of SmH and any of the other attributes of the sign chain Fo: (XmL,VmR, and
JmQ), but bereft of the crucial extra-, para- and peri-linguistic ingredients WZ, Yy, K, C, E,
GPMVHtm, and UZ, which are indispensable both for the verbalisation and for the comprehension
of an LP. The key notion is that, whether written or oral, literary or not, a speech act is much
10
It is moot whether the series of registers constitutes a system.
- 16 more than its verbalised vehicle - which is, itself, more than its sheer linguistic chain. Resorting
to the symbols alone (where > indicates determination, and <- or -> production, the mantissas
represent the events and phenomena taking place in real space/time and the exponents the virtual
systems or structures gravitating upon them) verbal communication is then formulated as:
D(V/T/I): WZ > Yy > LPIKo -> [Fo(XmL,SmH,VmR,JmQ)CmEm]GPMVHtm <-> UZ > LPCKo
As pointed out above, communication is achieved when, within a given objective situation
influenced by subjective emotional and cognitive factors, perceptual identity is established
between what the speaker wishes to convey and what the interlocutor understands:
G (LPIo= LPCo)
b. The translation model
On the basis of our model of verbal communication, García Landa gives a disarmingly simple
definition of translation (in its broader sense): Translating is talking; a language game whose
object is to isolate and reproduce in another language meanings meant - in other words: sense.
The translator substitutes himself for the comprehender: In the first speech act Do, he
understands on his behalf, he generates his LPCo; and then, in a second act Di, he substitutes
himself for the speaker, producing his own LPIi and gauging all of the new factors relevant for its
verbalisation in a new chain of linguistic and non-linguistic signs Fi(XnL,SnH,VnR,JnQ)CnEn. Thus
the general model of translation would be a global homofunctional, homoscopic re-production -but never a simple mirror-duplication-- of the original act:
WZ > Yy > LPIKo -> [Fo(XmL,SmH,VmR,JmQ)CmEm]GPMVHtm <-> UZ > LPCKo ->
------------------------------------------------Do-----------------------------------------------------> WZ>Yy > LPIKi -> [Fi(XnL,SnH,VnR,JnQ)CnEn]GPMVHtm+n <-> UZ > LPCKi
----------------------------------------------Di--------------------------------------------------------Where the sub-indexes m and n stand for the individual, specific, ad hoc features of the
respective exponents X, S, V, J, C, E, and VHt, and the sub-indexes o and i for the respective
languages. Yet, in order for translation to have succeeded, the result must be the same:
G (LPIi = LPCo)
García Landa and I thus assimilate the translational speech-act to the monolingual one:
Human beings understand each other (directly or through a mediator) when they attain that
perceptual identity, which is never complete, since there is no such thing as total communication,
but which, partial and limited as it is, often suffices, as corroborated by the fact that the species
still survives. It should be kept in mind that the model offers an abstract, ideal reference point, a
zero point from which to measure the deviations and distortions that existence imposes on
essence. The model does not prescribe what to do so that communication or translation succeed:
it simply lists the factors necessarily intervening in both and states when it can be said that they
have succeeded.
- 17 c. The interlingual intercultural mediation model
The truly expert interpreter, of course, does more than merely re-produce a speech act: He
mediates, he shuttles between the utterer's lips and the addressee's ears, modifying or altogether
disregarding certain elements as a function of his own skopos. The mediator takes such "liberties"
because he is a human being involved in speaking, as opposed to a machine receiving one code
through its keyboard and producing another on its display. In this liberty lies the heuristic nature
of his activity: As has often been said, the translator does not find equivalences, he creates them
each time he comes up with a verbalisation: an Fi which is the product a) of his comprehension
of the LPIo - his LPCo (the hermeneutic part of his task), and b) his analysis of the new
communicative situation (K, G, P, M, VHt, UZ). Such an analysis may well lead him to modify
even the intention or function of the original speech act. We are, in fact, still dealing with
identity, except that now our aim is not so much abstract but relevant or applied identity. On the
basis of this relevance, the mediator operates a transmutation of LPCo into LPIi and produces his
new chain Fi with all manner of trans-formations. Between what he has understood as
comprehender of the LPIo and what he decides to convey as verbaliser of his LPIi lies the
essence of the interpreter's mediating activity: by transforming he exercises both his
deontologically responsible freedom and his loyalty.
In symbolic notation, the model of interlingual intercultural communication would look
like this:
WZ > Yy > LPIoK -> [Fo(XmL,SmH,VmR,JmQ)CmEm]GPMVHtm <-> UZ > LPCoK [->]
-----------------------------------------------Do-----------------------------------------------------[->] WZ > Yy > LPIiK -> [Fi(XnL,SnH,VnR,JnQ)CnEn]GPMVHtm+n <-> UZ > LPCiK
--------------------------------------------Di-------------------------------------------------------Where the symbol [->] stands for the adaptation that the mediator operates between LPCo and
LPIi. Mediation succeeds when, within a given objective situation influenced by subjective
emotional and cognitive factors, relevant perceptual identity [=] is established between what the
speaker wishes to convey and what the interlocutor understands:
G (LPIo [=] LPCi)
This is, then, an ideal model of what may be heterofunctional/heteroscopic mediation,
which posits as felicity condition relevant identity between LPIo and LPCi. Thus, it serves also as
a quality standard, harmonising description and prescription: Unjustified, avoidable deviations
from global identity can be deemed to be methodologically wrong. To my mind, our model's
uniqueness is that it assimilates and dialectically develops all relevant attempts at defining and
explaining translation (dynamic equivalence, théorie du sens, skopostheorie, etc.) encompassing
and accounting for all of the relevant factors identified so far. Another advantage is its symbolic
notation, which makes it possible to represent the relevant notions and their relationships directly
and graphically, so that no time is wasted discussing names and definitions, which is the social
researcher's bane. As a matter of fact, the notions can be developed without changing the
symbols.
- 18 ANNEX II
THE SYMBOLS AND THEIR DEFINITIONS
W
Z
Y
y
U
LP
LPI
LPC
K
D
F
o
i
X
L
S
H
V
R
J
Q
C
E
G
P
M
VH
t
n,m
>
->
<->
=
[=]
[->]
Conscious motivation governing the speech act.
Unconscious predisposition to make oneself understood or to understand.
Main pragmatic intention.
Secondary pragmatic intentions.
Conscious motivation or resistance governing comprehension.
Speech-informed perception - articulation of the propositional and affective content
through speech.
Intended speech perception - what the speaker means to convey.
Comprehended speech perception - what is perceived by the comprehender.
Relevant knowledge and pre-comprehension schemes.
Speech act - V oral, T written, I inner, L reading.
Linguistic-signs chain (utterance).
Source language.
Target language
Phono-morpho-syntactic structure.
Phono-morpho-syntactic system.
Semantic potential.
Semantic system.
Rhythmico-prosodic structure.
Rhythmico-prosodic system.
Register.
Possible registers (it is moot whether registers are systematically organised.
Paralinguistic (elocutional) o perilinguistic (typographic) framing.
Kinetic or graphic framing.
Socio-historic field.
System of beliefs, experiences, norms and practices (culture).
Relevant world.
Historic time.
Moment.
Specific characteristics.
Determination.
Unidirectional production.
Bidirectional production (retro-projection by the comprehender on the sensorial
stimulus of his motivation/knowledge and its projection on the speech
perception).
Perceptual identity.
Relevant perceptual identity.
Transmutation by the mediator of the comprehended perception into intended perception
on the basis of relevant identity.