Innovative Practices for Teaching Sign Language Interpreters

Translation Techniques in Interpreter Education

JEFFREY E. DAVIS Translation Techniques in Interpreter Education THE BASIS for using translation techniques in interpreter preparation is that translation provides an important framework for teaching and learning the interpreting process. This approach allows interpretation to be taught as a series of successive learning situations that are critically linked to translation skills. In this systematic approach to teaching interpreting, translation forms the basis for consecutive interpretation, which precedes simultaneous interpretation . This teaching technique is particularly useful in helping students to get beyond the lexical and phrasal level (i.e., the surface structures) to the deeper levels of semantics, pragmatics, and semiotics . Because simultaneous interpretation involves time constraints and pressures, students are not always able to consciously focus on specific components ofthe process. The goal becomes one of"keeping up," which sometimes means the loss of message accuracy and linguistic purity. Teaching translation and consecutive interpretation as the foundation for simultaneous interpretation allows students to expand the skills involved in the interpreting process (e.g., concentration, visualization , short-term memory, and target language restructuring). Most important, this strategy teaches that the interpreter must understand not only the intended meaning of the source text but also the manner in which the audience is likely to understand the target language. Following Cokely (1992) the metaphor for interpreters in the 1990s has been one of linguistic and cultural mediation. Roy (1989, 2000) argues that interpreting is an interactive, face-to-face, 109 110 JEFFREY E. DAVIS communicative event and that the interpreter's role is active, governed by social and linguistic knowledge of the entire communicative situation. This involves not only linguistic and cultural competence but also the appropriate ways of speaking and managing the intercultural event of interpreting. Interpreting between structurally different languages in which the users of the languages being interpreted hold different worldviews is one of the challenges ofteaching and learning interpretation. Practitioners and educators agree that interpreters must make certain linguistic and cultural adjustments to accurately convey meaning. However, there has not been adequate examination of the strategies that interpreters use to accomplish this task. Furthermore, teaching strategies for this crosslinguistic and cross-cultural phenomenon have not been adequately described. The primary focus of this chapter is on translation as a teaching technique in interpreter preparation. Again, the premise here is that teaching interpretation involves a series of successive learning situations that are critically linked to translation skills. Furthermore , this chapter describes specific techniques and strategies that can be used to teach students of interpreting, particularly, how to make appropriate linguistic and cultural adjustments. To begin with, it is necessary to clarify some ofthe meanings associated with translation /translating and interpretation/interpreting. Although most discussions of interlingual communication emphasize the distinction between translating and interpreting, both essentially involve the same basic underlying principles. The work ofsemioticians and developments in pragmatics have brought us closer to a unified theory of interlingual communication, in this case, a greater understanding of general translation and interpretation processes. This brings us to a greater understanding ofthe essential similarities and differences between translating and interpreting. ISSUES OF DEFINITION The terms translation and interpretation are frequendy used interchangeably , for they share the common goal of transferring a mes- TRANSLATION TECHNIQUES 111 sage between two languages. Despite the shared goal, however, practitioners use the two terms to denote distinctive activities: practices and techniques. In fact, both translators and interpreters have their own distinct professional organizations. Practitioners typically use translation to describe linguistic conversion involving written texts, whereas interpretation is used to denote the unrehearsed (that is, unwritten ) conversion ofa message from the source language into the target language. The general convention, and the one that will be used throughout this chapter, is that translation and interpretation both refer to the general underlying process whereby meaning from one language is transferred to another language regardless of the form of either language (written, spoken, or signed). Whereas interpreters are required to simultaneously or consecutively interpret the message from one language to another, translators , who are working primarily with written texts, often have the luxury oftime to accomplish their task. Interpretation describes the process whereby the interpreter renders the source language message into the target language at approximately the same time as the source message is being delivered (simultaneously) or in chunks of discourse at varying time intervals following the delivery of the source message (consecutively). The major difference, then, between translating and interpreting is the time allowed to...