If I asked you to tell me when an interpreter interprets a phrase, you would most likely answer that it is after the speaker says this phrase. You would be correct, but also incorrect! Indeed, respecting this natural order is not always possible. In other words, the interpreter sometimes has no other choice but to anticipate what the speaker is going to say. Read more to find out what interpreters anticipate in simultaneous interpreting!
Anticipation in Simultaneous Interpreting
What does anticipation in simultaneous interpreting mean? It simply means that the interpreter says a word or a group of words before the speaker actually says them. There are several different strategies that an interpreter would use, which is not surprising if you think about it. After all, we are able to anticipate weather events, as well as certain situations (for example, when driving a car, you know what logical steps need to be followed to avoid getting into an accident).
Anticipation in simultaneous interpreting services is especially common between languages in which the normal word order is not the same. For example, English or French are SVO languages (normal word order is subject + verb + object), whereas German is an SOV language (normal word order is subject + object + verb). To solve this problem and not pause until the end of a sentence, which would be awkward for the audience, the interpreter makes a hypothesis or expresses a neutral word or expression, which enables him or her to postpone stating the verb which comes at the end of the sentence.
The issue of anticipation in simultaneous interpreting was first discussed in Venice in 1978 at the NATO Symposium on Language Interpretation and Communication. Participants wanted to find new ways of improving anticipation abilities in interpreters, as the needs and demands for interpreting were growing. In the years following that event, two main concepts of anticipation in simultaneous interpreting emerged.
On the one hand there is the “universal concept”. According to the “universalists”, the difficulty of simultaneous interpreting and anticipation does not depend on language pairs, and therefore the verb is not what most requires anticipation. The “universalists” believe that complete knowledge of the source language is necessary and sufficient to be able to anticipate what the speaker will say. However, several results from some experiments involving interpreting from French into German and vice versa generally disproved this theory. Not only did they show that the interpreters anticipated more when interpreting into French than into German (they had to anticipate every 85 seconds on average), but also that the verb was actually what they were anticipating most (roughly 80% of the anticipated words. On the other hand, the “bilateralist concept” partisans claim that anticipation in simultaneous interpreting is a language-specific phenomenon, and that the verb does have a special status. This concept is confirmed by the results from the experiment described above.
It has become more evident over the years that anticipation is enabled by several factors. Interpreters can be helped by linguistic factors, that is to say their knowledge of the source language – mastering expressions, set phrases or being able to quickly locate important key words is fundamental for anticipation. But there are also the so-called extra-linguistic factors. These refer to the text’s or the speaker’s particular background. Any information about them is really helpful for anticipation. Hence preparation before interpreting events is essential! Also prosody (that is to say non-verbal communication, such as the speaker’s tone, intonation, rhythm and body-language) plays an important role. However, it is not always possible to see the speaker. Moreover, the intonation does not necessarily have the same meaning depending on the language. For instance, studies showed English intonations can sound aggressive to German-speaking people, while German intonations are monotonous and boring to an English-speaking audience.
All in all, when interpreting between two languages which do not have the same natural word order, a very in-depth knowledge of the source language is required, even if it is considered to be one of your passive languages (that is to say, if you only interpret from that language). It also highlights the importance of training for an interpreter, because only in this manner will interpreting students learn how to anticipate properly.
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