Interpreters who explicitate talk more. On the relationship between explicitating styles and retrospective styles in simultaneous interpreting

ABSTRACT

Translators and interpreters leave their ‘linguistic fingerprint’ on the translated text. This distinctive way of formulating discourse is especially visible in interpreting, in which the target text is free from revision and editorial intervention. This study aims to account for idiosyncratic differences in explicitation patterns of simultaneous interpreting trainees by investigating the correlation between one of the indicators of interpreting style – explicitating frequency styles – and retrospective styles. We seek to establish whether these two forms of linguistic behaviour share some common traits characteristic for a given interpreter. The retrospective styles are operationalised adopting the parameters of verbosity, relevance, and informativeness of the reports. These parameters are compared against the explicitating frequency styles: abundant, medium, and lean. The results reveal a significant correlation between the density of explicitation pattern and the verbosity of the participants measured in words per comment. Interpreters who perform frequent explicitations tend to provide extensive retrospective verbalisations, whereas those with patterns of scarce shifts are more likely to provide brief and concise reports. This finding implies that one of the reasons behind explicitating behaviour of interpreters may be their individual tendency to opt for a more extensive surface form of linguistic expression.

KEYWORDS:

• Explicitation
• explicitating styles
• interpreting style
• retrospective protocols
• simultaneous interpreting
• trainee interpreters

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Lexical density (operationalised as the proportion of lexical words to the running words) has been successfully applied by Kajzer-Wietrzny (2013) to measure informativeness of interpreters’ outputs in her comparison of interpreting styles and speaking styles. Her choice is fully justified since she looked at the same feature in both forms of oral outputs. We had to discard it, however, because our aim is to explore the correlation between two different features – explicitation in interpreting outputs and informativeness of retrospective reports.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ewa Gumul

Ewa Gumul is currently working as an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics of the University of Silesia, Poland. She obtained her PhD in Linguistics in 2004 and Habilitation in 2018. Her research interests include conference interpreting, translation universals and the method of retrospection in Translation & Interpreting Studies research.