Models and types of interpreting
Interpretation is rendered in one mode: simultaneous. In simultaneous interpreting, the interpreter immediately speaks the message in the target-language whilst listening to it in the source language. Consecutive interpretation is rendered as “short consecutive interpretation” and “long consecutive interpretation”. In short consecutive interpretation, the interpreter relies on memory; each message segment being brief enough to memories. In long consecutive interpretation, the interpreter takes notes of the message to aid rendering long passages. These informal divisions are established with the client before the interpretation is effected, depending upon the subject, its complexity, and the purpose of the interpretation. On occasion, document sight translation is required of the interpreter, usually in consecutive interpretation work. Sight translation combines interpretation and translation; the interpreter must read aloud the source-language document to the target – language as if it were written in the target language. Sight translation occurs usually, but not exclusively, in judicial and medical work. Relay interpretation occurs when several languages are the target – language. A source – language interpreter renders the message to a language common to every interpreter, who then renders the message to his or her specific target – language. For example, a Japanese source message first is rendered to English to a group of interpreters, then it is rendered to Arabic, French, and Russian, the other target – languages. In simultaneous interpretation, the interpreter renders the message in the target-language as quickly as he or she can formulate it from the source language, while the source-language speaker continuously speaks: sitting in a sound-proof booth, the SI interpreter speaks into a microphone, while clearly seeing and hearing the source-language speaker via earphones. The simultaneous interpretation is rendered to the target-language listeners via their earphones. Moreover, SI is the common mode used by sign language interpreters. Note: Laymen often incorrectly describe SI and the SI interpreter as “simultaneous translation” and as the “simultaneous translator”, ignoring the definite distinction between interpretation and translation. In whispering interpreting, the interpreter sits or stands next to the small target-language audience whilst whispering a simultaneous interpretation of the matter to hand; this method requires no equipment. Chuchotage is used in circumstances where the majority of a group speaks the source language, and a minority (ideally no more than three persons) do not speak it. In consecutive interpreting, the interpreter speaks after the source-language speaker has finished speaking. The speech is divided into segments, and CI interpreter sits or stands beside the source-language speaker, listening and taking notes as the speaker progresses through the message. When the speaker pauses or finishes speaking, the interpreter then renders the entire message in the target-language. Consecutively-interpreted speeches, or segments of them, tend to be short. Fifty years ago, the CI interpreter would render speeches of 20 or 30 minutes, today, 10 or 15 minutes is considered long, particularly since audiences don’t like to sit through 20 minutes of speech they cannot understand. Often, the source-language speaker is unaware that he or she may speak at length before the CI interpretation is rendered, and might stop after each sentence to await its target-language rendering. Sometimes, the inexperienced or poorly trained interpreter asks the speaker to pause after each sentence; sentence-by-sentence interpreting requires less memorization, yet its disadvantage is in the interpreter's not having heard the entire speech or its gist, and the overall message is harder to render both because of lack of context and because of interrupted delivery (e.g., imagine a joke told in bits and pieces, with breaks for translation in between). This method is often used in rendering speeches, depositions, recorded statements, court witness testimony, and medical and job interviews, but it is always best to complete a whole idea before it is translated. Full consecutive interpreting allows for the source-language message's full meaning to be understood before the interpreter renders it to the target language. This affords a truer, accurate, and accessible interpretation than does simultaneous interpretation. Liaison interpreting involves relaying what is spoken to one, between two, or among many people. This can be done after a short speech, or consecutively, sentence-by-sentence, or as chuchotage (whispering); aside from note taken then, no equipment is used. Conference interpreting is the interpretation of a conference, either simultaneously or consecutively, although the advent of multi-lingual meetings has consequently reduced the consecutive interpretation in the last 20 years. Conference interpretation is divided between two markets: the institutional and private. International institutions, holding multi-lingual meetings, often favour interpreting several foreign languages to the interpreters' mother tongues. Local private markets tend to bi-lingual meetings (the local language plus another) and the interpreters work both into and out of their mother tongues; the markets are not mutually exclusive. The International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) is the only world-wide association of conference interpreters. Founded in 1953, it assembles more than 2.800 professional conference interpreters in more than 90 countries. Legal, court, or judicial interpreting, occurs in courts of justice, administrative tribunals, and wherever a legal proceeding is held (i.e. a conference room for a deposition or the locale for taking a sworn statement). Legal interpreting can be the consecutive interpretation of witnesses' testimony for example, or the simultaneous interpretation of entire proceedings, by electronic means, for one person, or all of the people attending. The right to a component interpreter for anyone who does not understand the language of the court (especially for the accused in a criminal trial) is usually considered a fundamental rule of justice. Therefore, this right is often guaranteed in national constitutions, declarations of rights, fundamental laws establishing the justice system or by precedents set by the highest courts. Depending upon the regulations and standards adhered to per state and venue, court interpreters usually work alone when interpreting consecutively, or as a team, when interpreting simultaneously. In addition to practical mastery of the source and target languages, through knowledge of law and legal and court procedures is required of court interpreters. They often are required to have formal authorization from the State to work in the Courts – and then are called sworn interpreters. In many jurisdictions, the interpretation is considered an essential part of the evidence. Incompetent interpretation, or simply to swear in the interpreter, can lead to a mistrial. In focus group interpreting, an interpreter sits in a sound proof booth or in on observer's room with the clients. There is usually a one way mirror between the interpreter and the focus group participants, wherein the interpreter can observe the participants, but they only see their own reflection. The interpreter hears the conversation in the original language through headphones and simultaneously interpreters into the target language for the clients. Since there are usually anywhere between 2 to 12 (or more) participants in any given focus group, experienced interpreters will not only interpret the phrases and meaning but will also mimic intonation, speech patterns, tone, laughs, and emotions. In escort interpreting, an interpreter accompanies a person or a delegation on a tour, on a visit, or to a meeting or interview. An interpreter in this role is called an escort interpreter or an escorting interpreter. This is liaison interpreting. Also known as community interpreting is the type of interpreting occurring in fields such as legal, health, and local government, social, housing, environmental health, education, and welfare services. In community interpreting, factors exist which determine and affect language and communication production, such as speech's emotional content, hostile or polarized social surroundings, its created stress, the power relationship among participants, and the interpreter's degree of responsibility – in many cases more than extreme; in some cases, even the life of the other person depends upon the interpreter's work. Medical interpreting is a subset of public service interpreting, consisting of communication, among medical personnel and the patient and his or her family, facilitated by an interpreter, usually formally certified and qualified to provide such interpretation services. In some situations medical employees who are multilingual may participate part-time as members of internal language banks. The medical interpreter must have a strong knowledge of medicine, common medical procedures, the patient interview, the medical examination processes, and the daily workings of the hospital or clinic were he or she works, in order to effectively serve both the patient and the medical personnel. Moreover, and very important, medical interpreters often are cultural liaisons for people (regardless of language) who are unfamiliar with or uncomfortable in hospital, clinical, or medical settings. When a hearing person speaks, an interpreter will render the speaker's meaning into the sign language used by the deaf party. When a deaf person signs, an interpreter will render the meaning expressed in the signs into the spoken language for the hearing party, which is sometimes referred to as voice interpreting or voicing. This may be performed either as simultaneous or consecutive interpreting, Skilled sign language interpreters will position themselves in a room or space that allows them both to be seen by deaf participants and heard by hearing participants clearly and to see and hear participants clearly. In some circumstances, an interpreter may interpret from one sign language into an alternate sign language. Deaf people also work as interpreters. They team with hearing counterparts to provide interpretation for deaf individuals who may not share the standard sign language used in that country. In other cases the hearing interpreted sign may be too pidgin to be understood clearly and the Deaf interpreter might interpret it into a more clear translation. They also relay information from one form of language to another – for example, when a person is signing visually, the deaf interpreter could be hired to copy those signs into a deaf-blind person's hand plus include visual information. By its very nature, media interpreting has to be conducted in the simultaneous mode. It is provided particularly for live television coverages such as press conferences, live or taped interviews with political figures, musicians, artists, sportsmen or people from the business circle. In this type of interpreting, the interpreter has to sit in a sound-proof booth where ideally he/she can see the speakers on a monitor ant the set. All equipment should be checked before recording begins. In particular, satellite connections have to be double-checked to ensure that the interpreter's voice is not sent back and the interpreter gets to hear only one channel at a time. In the case of interviews recorded outside the studio and some current affairs programme, the interpreter interprets what he or she hears on a TV monitor. Background noise can be a serious problem. The interpreter working for the media has to sound as slick and confident as a television presenter. Media interpreting has gained more visibility and presence especially after the Gulf War. Television channels have begun to hire staff simultaneous interpreters. The interpreter renders the press conference, telephone beepers, interviews and similar live coverage for the viewers. It is more stressful than other types of interpreting as the interpreter has to deal with a wide range of technical problems coupled with the control room's hassle and wrangling during live coverage.
Simultaneous and machine translation
Up to the end of the twentieth at the international congresses, conferences and meetings consecutive translation was practiced: the speech of orator was translated in other working languages after its performance. “Depending on the amount of working languages accepted at the assembly of the delegates, each performance was consistently repeated from a tribune several times, that resulted a large loss of time. Only at the end of the 20th incidentally was practiced translation of speeches simultaneously with their listening, which has received its name of simultaneous translation. “It is often argued that the first War Crimes trial (Nuremberg Trial) could not have possible simultaneous interpretation. The highlights of the early postwar period included the active participation of Soviet interpreters in the Nuremberg Trial and the Tokyo Trial of major Japanese war criminals. The real baptism of fire for a large group of Russian conference interpreters was the International Economic Conference held in Moscow in 1952. Since the 19th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, simultaneous translation has been more widely used on such occasions. The technique and hardware of simultaneous interpretation, at first somewhat crude and primitive, were gradually upgraded approaching international standards including a speaker's microphone, system of posting, headphones and microphones of the interpreters (mounted in special cabins) and headphones for the participants”. Each participant, being connected to the appropriate translation cabin, received an opportunity to listen to translation of speech simultaneously with the performance. The simultaneous translation gave significant economy of time, especially on the international meetings, where several working languages were used. Simultaneous translation gradually pressed consecutive translation and up to the present time became the basic kind of translation at all multilateral international forums. Being the top of the interpreting mastery, it drew my interest towards writing the project on this topic. Besides, as it appeared to be, there is not so much written about exact advices of interpreters or especially for teaching simultaneous translation. Besides, even the best methodology will not create a super-professional interpreter, but using these techniques it is possible to upgrade the level of interpretation skills. The difficulty is that there are only theoretical works concerning this topic and not so many practical advices and exercises for the future interpreters training. Simultaneous translation is one of the most complicated kinds of translation. The main feature of simultaneous translation consists of parallel perception of speech of the orator and giving out the speech in language of translation. This feature of simultaneous translation defines other features of this kind and first of all the rigid limit of time: the interpreter has only the period of pronouncing the speech by the speaker for translation. This time is twice less than what the interpreter has at consecutive translation, and in 20-30 times less, than at written text translation of the same speech. The interpreter has not only less time for translation, but also is imposed to the rate of translation, which should correspond to the rate of pronouncing the speech. Besides simultaneous translation has such special feature as segmental character: the interpreter translates the text in segments in process of their receipt, whereas during consecutive translation (as well as at written translation of written materials) the interpreter listens to the whole text. These features make simultaneous translation very difficult for learning. To simultaneous translation, perhaps, the traditional formula is almost not applied: in order to translation one needs to know two languages and subject of conversation. It is known, that not every man freely speaking foreign language is capable to take possession translation. First, preparation of the oral interpreters included mass ideological preparation, which completely brought to nothing a professional etiquette of the oral interpreter. Ideological sense of translation in the Soviet spirit was put much above its accuracy. Some decent interpreters tried to avoid it. It is where the opinion about harm of training came from. Second, the thematic principle was frequently practiced in training the interpreters (and is practiced still now). This principle is seen in narrow specialization of the training books: “The Textbook of military translation”, “Translation of the chemical texts”. The thematic orientation of training is on the decline, not only because it educates the interpreters with a narrow professional outlook; its main disadvantage consists of mixing different things – knowledge on a theme and professional skills. In other words, knowledge about what to be spoken in the text and knowledge of what to be done with the text. And finally, the third feature, which is, perhaps, most essential for the Russian history of translation. Traditionally, to tell the truth, interpreters were considered as the interpreters of fiction. The theorists of translation focused their attention on fiction as deserving primary attention. Consequently, frequent answer to a question, whether it is possible to learn translation, is understood only in application to fiction. And the answer at once caused difficulties. The art of translation requires such huge volume of background erudition, additional knowledge and performance of complex texture of translation tasks that frequently the thesis about creativeness is put forward, where reigns inspiration. The skill of translating fiction is a specific skill, and though the possession of it is impossible without some rules working for translation of any text, but nevertheless it does not guarantee to the interpreter the skill to translate non-fiction. It is necessary to tell, that intuition and inspiration, which helps to feel and to transfer complex and fine stylistics, individual style and much of other things in translation, prevents the interpreter to take the higher level of wider generalizations, and he would not be able to distribute the personal experience to work with the non-fiction texts, what simply means that the interpreter of fiction frequently, simply speaking, is not able to translate the non-fiction. And nevertheless, definitely: it is possible to learn! The experience of many translation schools of the world shows it. Training there is constructed differently, but always contains a constant set of obligatory components and gives the result. And common sense tells us that to learn is not only possible, but also necessary: it is impossible in the modern world to start up development of this important trade without paying attention. It harms the quality of translation production and reduces prestige of a profession. Machine translation (MT) is a procedure whereby a computer program analyzes a source text and produces a target text without further human intervention. In reality, however, machine translation typically does involve human intervention, in the form of pre-editing and post-editing. An exception to that rule might be, e.g., the translation of technical specifications (strings of technical terms and adjectives), using a dictionary-based machine-translation system. To date, machine translation—a major goal of natural-language processing—has met with limited success. A November 6,2007, example illustrates the hazards of uncritical reliance on machine translation. Machine translation has been brought to a large public by tools available on the Internet, Such as Yahoo!'s Babel Fish, Babylon, and StarDict. This tools produce a “gisting translation” – a rough translation that, with luck, “gives the gist” of the source text. With proper terminology work, with preparation of the source text for machine translation (pre-editing), and with re-working of the machine translation by a professional human translator (post-editing), commercial machine-translation tools can produce useful results, especially if the machine-translation system is integrated with a translation – memory or globalization – management system. In regard to texts (e.g., weather reports) with limited ranges of vocabulary and simple sentence structure, machine translation can deliver results that do not require much human intervention to be useful. Also, the use of a controlled language, combined with a machine-translation tool, will typically generate largely comprehensible translations. Relying exclusively on unedited machine translation ignores the fact that communication in human language is context – embedded and that it takes a person to comprehend the context of the original text with a reasonable degree of probability. It is certainly true that even purely human-generated translations are prone to error. Therefore, to ensure that a machine-generated translation will be useful to a human being and that publishable-quality translation is achieved, such translations must be reviewed and edited by a human. The late Claude Piron wrote that machine translation, at its best, automates the easier part of a translator's job; the harder and more time-consuming part usually involves doing extensive research to resolve ambiguities in the source text, which the grammatical and lexical exigencies of the target language require to be resolved. Such research is a necessary prelude to the pre-editing necessary in order to provide input for machine-translation software such that the output will not be meaningless. The lessons of machine translations's first 50 years aren't the kind we are used to hearing from our best and brightest machines: Make peace with stubborn limitations, cut the hype, think in the scale of decades of gradual evolution, forget about breakthoughs. In our laptops, we already have memory capacity and processing apeed that would have been barely imaginable in the age of the tube-driven mainframes, but machine translation historian John Hutchins believes that even “infinite computer power is not a solution”. What is needed, he says, is deeper insight into the processes of language and cognition. “there is no such thing as ‘perfect’ translation”, he adds. “There are only translations more or less suitable or successful for specific purposes and contexts”.