Evolving Paradigms in Interpreter Education:

Evolution of Theory, Evolution of Role: How Interpreting Theory Shapes Interpreter Role

128 B A R B A R A S H A F F E R Evolution of Theory, Evolution of Role: How Interpreting Theory Shapes Interpreter Role By your metaphors so shall you be known. —Raymond D. Fogelson Abstract Regardless of the languages being considered, it has often been said that: “you can’t interpret what you don’t understand.” Of course, such a statement necessarily refers to meaning, but the beliefs we hold about how we understand are also of importance. Our beliefs about things such as words, sentences, discourse, prosody, human interaction , and culture shape what we believe about meaning, which in turn influences the way we approach the interpretation task and how we educate future interpreters. In this chapter we explore the notion of meaning and how our understanding of it shapes our conception of our professional role as American Sign Language (ASL) / English interpreters. ASL/English interpreting is a young profession, despite the long history of volunteer interpreting services. I simply mean that it has not been considered a profession for long and has been the subject of academic inquiry for only a short time. If we agree that the 1964 meeting in Muncie, Indiana, represents one of the earliest professional gatherings on the subject, then the field of interpreting is a scant 48 years old at the time of this writing . Yet, in that roughly half a century, we have seen tremendous growth and have done much careful work with the goal of better understanding the task we approach daily. We have made great strides in improving the Evolution of Theory, Evolution of Role 129 service we offer. Our thoughtful discussions have done much to prepare future interpreters. One issue that has followed us through the decades, however, is the notion of interpreter role. In the following sections, the role of the ASL/ English interpreter is considered within the context of the intellectual discussions that guided us. The theme I suggest is as follows: Our misconceptions about language and specifically our discomfort with mistaken beliefs about the nature of meaning and the concept of the message have directly and indirectly (albeit often tacitly) spurred the ever-evolving view of our professional role. Our changing views of our role also then become part of interpreter education program curricula. Metaphors are often used to understand theories and models. We use metaphors unconsciously and consciously throughout our day. Metaphors help us understand our world and communicate with others. They shape how we think (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), and the metaphors we create influence how we understand the very thing we created the metaphor to describe. In the case of interpreting, we first created metaphors of our professional role that described us as passively conveying information, not influencing the communicative event. That metaphor pervades the literature on both interpreter role and message analysis. The metaphor, rather than simply a means for describing our role, began to shape our role and our work. As a young undergraduate student I remember being faced (in Psychology 101) with the quote: “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Quite frankly, as a phrase it had me stumped. I understood each of the words, more or less, but could not make sense of the sentence. I grappled with its meaning. This theory, that the embryonic development of an individual organism (its ontogeny) follows the same path as the evolutionary history of the species (phylogeny), has since been discredited. However, as a somewhat ironic sidebar of sorts, it is fitting here. One can consider the interpreting field not just in terms of its history but also in terms of the development of the individual interpreter, because, of course, each of us has an ever-evolving understanding of the message and our role. Each interpreter ’s evolving conceptualization of role probably resembles the field’s transformation, whether the interpreter is formally educated, certified, and well read in the works of her field or not. 130 Barbara Shaffer Early Conceptualizations of Role and Language In this section I review some of our early discussions of the interpreter ’s role, summarize the literature on meaning and the message in ASL/ English interpreting, and link both with linguistic theories of the time. For comparison, the more prominent contemporary theories of interpreting found in the spoken language literature will also be mentioned, as they were heavily influenced by linguistic theories of the time. ASL/English interpreters were also influenced by popular linguistic...