Interpreting Studies

"THEMATIC PROGRESSION AS AN OVERRULING FACTOR IN ORGANISING CI TEACHING
The article forms a universal suggestion to organise the teaching of conference in interpreting and it appeared in response to the claim that (Polish) interpreting curricula should be standardised at least to some extent. Although the presence of main thematic areas (general, religious, business, legal and scientific texts) as well as their sequence has been argued for based on modern interpreting theories, the model is still largely flexible. This flexibility, along with transparency are probably the models’ strongest points. Its universality should allow for an easy implementation and testing in most CI teaching environments."

A code of conduct should assist professionals in understanding what is considered good practice in their working environment. However, the standing codes of ethics for PSI practitioners in Spain and the UK fall short in resolving interpreters’ dilemmas in situations of conflict. This paper aims at underscoring the deficiencies of the codes of conduct for health care interpreters in these two countries. To that end, health care personnel and professional interpreters were surveyed. The results highlight the need for greater co-operation between both professions to dispel the conflicts of opinion undermining the role of interpreters. Furthermore, the health care sector could undoubtedly benefit from a joint effort to draft universal standards upon which each country can develop its own specialised code.

The author presents different facets of influence of the European Union institutions on interpreter training in Poland. The overall extent of these influences is assessed as too great, especially in view of the current level of professionalisation of the occupation. Several EU ‘norms’ or tendencies such as the avoidance of retour interpreting, promotion of multilingualism, marginalisation of consecutive interpreting, but also the introduction of three cycles of studies are examined along with their potential influence on the Polish prospective interpreters. The text closes with an appeal to pursue a higher level of professionalisation that could actually protect against undue influences from all quarters.

"It could seem that at the intersection of highly complicated student performance profiles and the maze of interrelated features that every text is characterised by, any attempt to ‘foresee’ the general level of difficulty of a text for a group of interpreting trainees is a game of guessing. The article ventures to bring some order into the chaos of sequencing materials for classes (Patrie 2000). The guidelines are based on first selecting the highest possible number of textual features discussed elsewhere in the TI literature such as mode of delivery (Kopczyński), lexical and informational density (Alexieva), novelty (Gile) to mention just a few; then bringing them down to common denominators by showing possible overlaps and finally building them into hierarchical networks of co-related features to be controlled by the teacher for each individual class and assignment.

An introductory experimental procedure is also envisaged to test the ‘real’ difficulty of any given aspect of an interpreting material and a discussion of possible consequences thereof both for the future research and its practical application in the teaching methodology.

In the process several other issues of utmost importance for teaching interpreters are brought up again, such as the old question of manipulating the above mentioned textual features (authenticity of teaching materials); differences between professionals and novices in their perceptions of interpreting difficulties or the increase in autonomy resulting from the ever more popular on-line teaching. As a side note, some basic suggestions are formulated for keeping and running databases of teaching materials both individually and as a common effort (at the institutional or interinstitutional level)."

This contribution demonstrates an even more practice-oriented exploitation of corpora, both monolingual and parallel. It describes the design of a software, InterpretBank, which supports conference interpreters in all stages of their work. Based on Baroni and Bernardini’s (2004) BootCat mechanism, the program harvests the web for domain-specific documents given a set of search terms, performs term extraction on them and uses additional resources, e.g. Wikipedia or bilingual online dictionaries, to propose definitions, translations, collocations and keyword-in-context information. All available modules, for harvesting, management and retrieval, are adapted to the specific needs of interpreters, reducing the time needed for preparation and allowing for efficient retrieval while interpreting. A pilot module adds the possibility to include parallel resources, e.g. translation memories or the OPUS corpora, in the preparation phase.

"Изложены аргументы в поддержку мнения об уместности обучения переводу с листа на завершающем этапе подготовки переводчика международных конференций, после усвоения студентами базовых навыков синхронного перевода. Предлагается использовать перевод с листа в качестве подготовительного упражнения для синхронного перевода с текстом.

The article argues that formal training in sight translation is most appropriate at final stages of conference interpreting training programs, when students have already mastered basic simultaneous interpreting skills. It is suggested that sight translation be used as a preparatory exercise for simultaneous interpreting with text."

The use of corpus-based materials in language learning and translator training has gained momentum in recent years. Based on the assumption that the exploitation of such resources can be extended to the field of interpreter education, this paper presents the findings from four case studies, in which the BACKBONE corpus was used in the training of undergraduate interpreting students. During each study, students were asked to indicate how they had used the materials and to express their opinions about the resources from a user-perspective. The paper provides an evaluation of the materials and suggests methods of exploiting spoken corpus-based resources in the undergraduate interpreting context.Die Verwendung von Korpora in der Sprachpädagogik und in der Übersetzerausbildung hat in den letzten Jahren an Bedeutung gewonnen. Der vorliegende Artikel geht davon aus, dass korpusbasierte Ressourcen auch in der Dolmetscherausbildung angewendet werden können, und präsentiert Erkenntnisse aus vier Fallstudien, in denen die BACKBONE Korpora in der Ausbildung von Bachelor-Studierenden im Fachbereich Dolmetschen eingesetzt wurden. In jeder Studie wurden Daten zur Nutzung der Korpusressourcen durch die Studierenden erhoben und deren Ansichten sondiert. Der Artikel beginnt mit der Darstellung und kritischen Bewertung der wesentlichen Ergebnisse. Im Anschluß daran werden Methoden für die Anwendung gesprochener Kopora in der Ausbildung von Bachelor-Dolmetschstudierenden diskutiert.

La interpretación simultánea, por sus características, requiere el desarrollo de unas habilidades prácticas, por lo que se presta especialmente al trabajo autónomo del estudiante. Este MOOC pretende completar la oferta incipiente pero todavía limitada de materiales didácticos abiertos en línea con actividades guiadas de preparación a la interpretación simultánea y materiales audiovisuales seleccionados por su adecuación a la primera etapa del aprendizaje de esta profesión. Se dirige, por lo tanto, a cualquier estudiante que quiera iniciarse en la interpretación simultánea en la combinación inglés-español. El objetivo del curso es acompañar al estudiantado en el inicio de la adquisición de las destrezas necesarias para esta modalidad de interpretación.