More spoken or more translated?

Abstract

Since the early 1990s, with the advance of computerized corpora, translation scholars have been using corpus-based methodologies to look into the possible existence of overriding patterns (tentatively described as universals or as laws) in translated texts. The application of such methodologies to interpreted texts has been much slower in developing than in the case of translated ones, but significant progress has been made in recent years. After presenting the fundamental methodological hurdles -and advantages -of working on machine-readable (transcribed) oral corpora, we present and discuss several recent studies using cross-modal comparisons, and examine the viability of using interpreted outputs to explore the features that set simultaneous interpreting apart from other forms of translation. We then set out to test the hypothesis that modality may exert a stronger effect than ontology -i.e. that being oral (vs. written) is a more powerful influence than being translated (vs. original).

Nouns, Verbs and Other Parts of Speech in Translation and Interpreting: Evidence from English Speeches Made in the European Parliament and Their German Translations and Interpretations

“…In general, the interpretations seem to exhibit features of spoken language, though "it may also be argued that interpreted discourse displays features which set it apart; i.e., features of interpretese" (Shlesinger 2008, p. 250). Shlesinger and Ordan (2012) provide additional corpus evidence confirming that interpreted language exhibits features of spoken language. Pronouns and adverbs are more frequent in simultaneous interpretations than in written translation.…”

“…Pronouns and adverbs are more frequent in simultaneous interpretations than in written translation. Moreover, Shlesinger and Ordan (2012) show that proper nouns are severely underrepresented in simultaneous interpretations, which is interpreted as reflecting the oral nature of interpreting.…”

“…Written translation exhibits a more nominal style in German, and pronouns are typical of simultaneous interpretation in both English and German. Much in the spirit of Shlesinger and Ordan (2012), the authors conclude that "interpreting seems to be more spoken than originals" (Przybyl et al 2022, p. 201). Dayter (2018) deals with the distributions of POS-tags in English and Russian.…”

Cohesion in English to ASL simultaneous interpreting

“…Several studies have been done on spoken language interpreters that identified the explicitation of various aspects of a target text. Shlesinger (1995) found evidence of shifts in cohesion between English and Hebrew and in a later study again looking at interpreters working from English to Hebrew, Shlesinger and Ordan (2012) found an increased use of adverbs in their target texts. Gumul (2006) noted an increase in conjunctive devices in the work of interpreters between English and Polish, as did Becher (2011) in a corpus study of English to German translations.…”

Simultaneous Interpreting as a Noisy Channel: How Much Information Gets Through

“…Due to their statistical character, these properties can be automatically uncovered (Baroni and Bernardini, 2005;Volansky et al, 2015;Kunilovskaya and Lapshinova-Koltunski, 2020) and have recently received increased attention in multilingual language processing (Dutta Chowdhury et al, 2020;Artetxe et al, 2020;Graham et al, 2020). However, simultaneous interpreting as a spoken mediation type tends to show different properties than translation (Kajzer-Wietrzny, 2012), interpretese being more pronounced overall and reinforcing spoken features (Shlesinger and Ordan, 2012).…”