Use of strategies in english-brazilian portuguese simultaneous interpreting by undergraduate students: an exploratory study of the interpreting process

Abstract

This MA thesis aims at investigating the use of strategy in simultaneous interpreting by undergraduate translation students from a cognitive perspective. The specific objectives are: 1) to identify the most common strategy used by students, 2) to assess whether these strategies are related their cognitive effort, and 3) to assess whether these strategies are related to interpreting norms. This exploratory study with an experimental design had students from the Undergraduate Program in Translation of Universidade Federal de Uberlândia (Brazil) perform a 5’10”-long simultaneous interpreting task from English into Brazilian Portuguese. The interpreting sessions were audio-recorded, with their files containing both source and target speeches. The audio files were transcribed individually using software EXMARaLDA Partitur-Editor and displayed on a timeline (in milliseconds) with a multi-tier format. The analysis was built on an inter-textual comparison between the source speech and each target speech. The data were analyzed from a cognitive perspective, i.e., by analyzing both process and product (DONATO, 2003; GARZONE, 2002; GILE, 2009[1995]; KALINA, 2005; KOHN; KALINA, 1996; LI, 2013, 2015; PÖCHHACKER, 2016; RICCARDI, 2005; SHLESINGER, 2000), with a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches. The qualitative analysis draws on Gile’s (2009[1995]) Effort Models and on Toury’s (2012[1995]) operational norms as applied to interpreting by Garzone (2002) and Gile (2009[1995]). The results indicate that the students employed tactics (GILE, 2009[1995]), not strategies. They also point out that: 1) the most frequently employed tactics were omission, chunking, morphosyntactic transformation and transcoding, 2) most of the tactics used can be related to participants’ cognitive effort, and 3) most of the tactics can be related to interpreting norms. These findings contribute to understanding the simultaneous interpreting process in the English-Brazilian Portuguese language pair, which remains unexplored in the literature. Additionally, they contribute to interpreter training and to Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies, especially those related to simultaneous interpreting.