Relay interpreting: Qualitative view on message loss in the Czech - English language pair

Bc. Tereza VÁLKOVÁ

Master's thesis

Interpreted text as an end product or as a source for relay

Abstract:

The thesis deals with the practice of relay, which is being used increasingly in the unique environment of European institutions. Unique because of the fact that no other international institution operates and communicates using 23 official EU languages and many other of those countries outside of the EU. Languages of small diffusion are also involved in debates and negotiations, therefore a combination of retour and relay is a practice used not only on local markets during international conferences but also commonly in the EU institutions. We arranged an experiment inspired by an investigation made by Jennifer Mackintosh in 1983, in which she came to the conclusion that there is no significant difference in message loss between the direct and relay conditions for the English/French pair. Her findings are often cited by interpreting professionals and practitioners but not many mention further that there is a message loss between the two conditions, the loss is manifested qualitatively and not quantitatively. Although in the case of explicitation one cannot really speak about loss but rather alteration or modification of the message. Moreover, another important variable is the language pair, we therefore attempted to characterize the specifics of the Czech/English pair and draw conclusions regarding the syntactic rearrangements between the two languages. We tested factors contributing to the qualitative message loss outlined by Mackintosh and based on analysis on our corpus, we revealed other factors and described other vulnerable areas of the source text that may exercise influence on the relayed version of interpretation. We distinguished between factors in Set I. that influence the message in source-direct version of interpreting and factors in Set II. that influence qualitative message loss in direct-relay version. Set I. listed factors such as figures, proper names, polysemy, inferencing, lexical search, coreferential search and syntactical rearrangement. To this list we added other "problem triggers", namely false friends, non-cognate and remote lexical equivalents, move from a more concrete to a more abstract level, unfamiliar concepts and embedded phrases. Set II. comprised factors that superseded in the direct-relay version the first set of factors. Among those we listed generalisation and abstraction, loss of coherence, weakening of semantic signals, weakening of relational links, hesitation, bunching of message segments, expliciteness and omission.

Abstract:

The thesis deals with the practice of relay, which is being used increasingly in the unique environment of European institutions. Unique because of the fact that no other international institution operates and communicates using 23 official EU languages and many other of those countries outside of the EU. Languages of small diffusion are also involved in debates and negotiations, therefore a combination of retour and relay is a practice used not only on local markets during international conferences but also commonly in the EU institutions. We arranged an experiment inspired by an investigation made by Jennifer Mackintosh in 1983, in which she came to the conclusion that there is no significant difference in message loss between the direct and relay conditions for the English/French pair. Her findings are often cited by interpreting professionals and practitioners but not many mention further that there is a message loss between the two conditions, the loss is manifested qualitatively and not quantitatively. Although in the case of explicitation one cannot really speak about loss but rather alteration or modification of the message. Moreover, another important variable is the language pair, we therefore attempted to characterize the specifics of the Czech/English pair and draw conclusions regarding the syntactic rearrangements between the two languages. We tested factors contributing to the qualitative message loss outlined by Mackintosh and based on analysis on our corpus, we revealed other factors and described other vulnerable areas of the source text that may exercise influence on the relayed version of interpretation. We distinguished between factors in Set I. that influence the message in source-direct version of interpreting and factors in Set II. that influence qualitative message loss in direct-relay version. Set I. listed factors such as figures, proper names, polysemy, inferencing, lexical search, coreferential search and syntactical rearrangement. To this list we added other "problem triggers", namely false friends, non-cognate and remote lexical equivalents, move from a more concrete to a more abstract level, unfamiliar concepts and embedded phrases. Set II. comprised factors that superseded in the direct-relay version the first set of factors. Among those we listed generalisation and abstraction, loss of coherence, weakening of semantic signals, weakening of relational links, hesitation, bunching of message segments, expliciteness and omission.

Keywords

relay, retour, message loss, Jennifer Mackintosh, factors contributing to qualitative message loss

Language used: English

Date on which the thesis was submitted / produced: 17. 5. 2018

Thesis defence

• Supervisor: PhDr. Veronika Prágerová, Ph.D.

PALACKÝ UNIVERSITY OLOMOUC

Faculty of Arts

Master programme / field:
Philology / English for Translators and Interpreters