Aimuratova nilufar tengel kizi simultataneous interpreter: difficulties and prospects of the profession

Difficulties of the profession

Linguistic problems
In the process of simultaneous translating it is usual that may appear some problems which can be improved by practice and knowledge of interpreter. Mostly the matters happen because of the misunderstanding cultures, traditions, customs and other factors. So it demands many aspects from interpreter: awareness not only language but also historical and ethnic issues. According to the Tightrope Hypothesis, three types of phenomena cause the overwhelming majority of errors and omissions among professional simultaneous interpreters. The first is mismanagement of attentional resources. The second is an increase of processing capacity requirements. The third is short information-carrying signals with little redundancy such as short names, numbers, short lexical units in text with little grammatical or semantic redundancy such as are often found in Chinese, for example. They are particularly vulnerable to short lapses of attention which cause loss of signal from the speaker with little chance of recovery through redundancy. Triggers most often discussed among interpreters and studied in the literature belong to the second category and include in particular the following:

1. 
   Rapid delivery of speeches, dense speeches and speech segments as well as written speeches read out aloud. In all these cases, interpreters are forced to analyze much incoming information containing signal over very short periods, which puts the Reception Effort under a heavy workload. Moreover, since they cannot afford to lag behind, they also have to formulate their target speech rapidly, which imposes a heavy load on the Production Effort.
   

b. Embedded structures and multi-word names such (names of organizations, conventions etc.) In both of these cases, interpreters have to store much information in memory as the target speech unfolds before they can reformulate it. In multi-word names, the problem arises mainly due to the need to reorganize the components in the target language. For instance, WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, translates into French as OMPI, Organisation Mondiale de la Propriété Intellectuelle. The first word in the name in English is second in French, the second becomes fourth, the third remains third, and the fourth becomes the first. If the interpreter cannot anticipate the name in a speech and is not very familiar with the French equivalent, s/he will be forced to wait until the fourth word is pronounced in English before starting to translate it, with repeated retrievals from memory of the English name and what has already been translated into French at every stage of the translation, a very taxing task. In a small experiment with a 12 minutes extract from an authentic speech, Gile (1984) found that out of 15 interpreters who interpreted the speech from English into French,only 3 managed to interpret correctly one of the two multi-word names it contained and none interpreted correctly the other.
c. Noise and low quality signal from the speaker. This includes poor sound produced by the electronic equipment, background noise, but also strong accents, poor language quality such as incorrect lexical usage and grammar, careless and non-standard signing when using a sign language, poor logic and ambiguous formulation of ideas. In all these cases, Reception becomes more difficult. Strong accents and poor language quality are frequent when working from English, which has become a lingua franca worldwide and is often used by speakers who do not necessarily master it very well.
d. Working from one language into another which is syntactically and/or lexically very different. The lexical difficulty applies mostly to interpreting from spoken languages into sign languages, which have a much smaller lexicon, and finding a way to express in a sign language a concept which is lexicalized in the spoken language but has no sign these as known as ‘lexical gaps’ can require considerable effort and time – at cognitive. As to syntactic differences, they have the same effect as multi-word names, in that they require waiting and storing much information in short-term memory before reformulation of the message in the target language. A few typical examples can illustrate how speech and speaker-related difficulties and intentional resource management errors can combine to produce EOIs in simultaneous
interpreting due to the fact that interpreters tend to work close to cognitive saturation.