Simultaneous interpreting: A relevance-theoretic approach_2005

Simultaneous interpreting:A relevance-theoretic approach

BRANCA VIANNA

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to discuss a specific mode of translation—

simultaneous interpreting (SI)—within the framework of relevance theory

(RT). It is based on Ernst-August Gutt’s account of translation, Transla-

tion and Relevance: Cognition and Context (2000). The introduction

presents the notion of simultaneous interpreting as interpretive use of lan-

guage, in which the speech produced by the interpreter achieves relevance

by virtue of its interpretive resemblance with the source speech. Part one

reflects on the di¤erences between written translation and simultaneous

interpreting. Part two considers the question of e¤ort, a crucial relevance-

theoretic concept, in terms of the e¤ort expended both by the interpreter

and by her listeners. Part three discusses the role of the interpreter in the

communicative act and the possible degrees of interpretive resemblance

achieved by the interpreter’s rendering of the source speech. Part four sug-

gests a few relevance-theoretic explanations to certain types of errors in si-

multaneous interpreting. The paper comes to the conclusion that relevance-

theory is not only an excellent framework for simultaneous interpreting

research but also a possible tool for improving interpreter-training methods.

1. Introduction

According to Grice, one of the essential features of human communica-

tion is the expression and recognition of intentions (Grice 1989). Rele-

vance theory takes this idea and develops it into an empirical theory of

inferential communication, according to which a communicator provides

evidence of his intention to convey a certain meaning, which is inferredby the audience on the basis of the evidence provided (Sperber & Wilson

1995). According to this approach, most communication between humans

is ostensive-inferential communication. There must be ostension on the

Intercultural Pragmatics 2-2 (2005), 169–190 1612-295X/05/0002–0169

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(V7(M) 29/3/05 08:16) WDG/G J-1277 Inter Prag, 2-2 PMU: S(A) WSL(V)24/3 Times_M (0).3.04.05 (148�225mm) pp. 169–190 003_P (p. 169)

part of the speaker and the hearer must infer the meaning of what is being

ostensively communicated.

Simultaneous interpreting (SI) is a service

practiced in professional conditions, in which interpreters in a sound-proof booth

with headsets, control consoles and microphones, and a direct view on the meet-

ing room, deliver versions of the discourse in di¤erent languages ‘on line,’ with a

lag of a few seconds, alternating every 20–30 minutes or as speakers take turns on

the conference floor. (Setton 1999: 1)

This is a special form of ostensive human communication: there is a

speaker on a podium, with a microphone, addressing an audience which

is there expressly to hear him and learn as much as possible from what he

will say. The audience cannot help but perceive the ostensive communi-

cative behavior of the speaker and will therefore automatically make

inferences and attribute meaning to what he is saying. The role of theinterpreter is to facilitate this exchange when speaker and audience do

not speak the same language. The interpreter perceives the ostensive com-

municative behavior of the speaker and must make her1 own informative

intention clear to her hearers. She is not the primary addressee of the

communication; nor is she the initiator or the addressee of the message.

The speaker’s ostension is not directed at her but at the members of the

audience, both those who speak the conference language and those who

use simultaneous interpreting (Setton 1999: 8).The interpreter does not have at her disposal the same resources as the

speaker: she cannot usually be seen by the audience, and therefore cannot

use visual pragmatic clues to make her intentions clear. What she does

have, and must use to her advantage, is the audience’s complete attention.

Even though the audience cannot see the interpreters, they have them in

their heads, so to speak, through earphones. When the speaker begins his

lecture, presentation, speech, etc., it is the interpreter’s voice that the

audience will hear. The interpreter can use this to convey, through choiceof word order, intonation, pauses, etc., the meaning, both explicit and

implicit, of what is being communicated by the speaker. In this sense, the

role of the interpreter is that of an intermediary. She attempts to infer the

relevance of the original speech for her audience and finds how best to ex-

press this in the target language.

Relevance theory can make an important contribution to SI research

and theory because it aims to explain in cognitively realistic terms what

happens in communication. It claims that the expectations of relevanceraised by an utterance may be precise enough, and predictable enough,

to guide the hearer towards the speaker’s meaning. What I wish to do is

discuss how interpreters can use the principles and mechanisms proposed

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by relevance theory (and good interpreters do this intuitively) to fulfill the

audience’s expectations of relevance by producing a speech in the target

language that achieves relevance by virtue of its interpretive resemblance

with the source speech. The interpreter’s utterances are meant ‘‘not

simply to express the same ideas that someone expressed, but [to present]

those ideas as an expression of what that person expressed’’ (Gutt 2000:

209–210).This is the main concept behind Ernst-August Gutt’s Translation and

Relevance: Cognition and Context (2000), on which I will base most of

the remarks in this paper. Gutt claims that translation is ‘‘interlingual

interpretive use of language’’2 (Gutt 2000: 127). He uses the relevance-

theoretic concept of interpretive use of language to explain the process of

translation and the choices made by translators when faced with di‰cult

source texts.

Gutt believes that there are two communicative acts (speaker to audi-ence; translator/interpreter to audience) taking place both in translation

and in interpreting:

. . . translation is an act of communication between translator and target audience

only. This is true even in simultaneous interpretation, where the original author

may be physically together with the target audience. As far as the audience is con-

cerned, what they are actually confronted with is the target text produced by the

translator; that text comes with a promise or presumption of interpretively resem-

bling the original text, but the original text does not reach the target audience.

(Gutt 2000: 214–215 italics as in original)

According to relevance theory, an utterance may be used descriptively

or interpretively. It is used descriptively when it represents some state of

a¤airs by virtue of its propositional form being true of that state of af-fairs. It is used interpretively when its propositional form represents an-

other propositional form by virtue of a resemblance in content between

the two. This relationship of interpretive resemblance between propositio-

nal forms is based on the sharing of some or all of their logical properties

(and more particularly their logical and contextual implications). Gutt be-

lieves that a translated text should interpretively resemble the original ‘‘in

respects that make it adequately relevant to the audience—that is, that

o¤er adequate contextual e¤ects’’ (what are now called cognitive e¤ectsin current relevance-theory texts) and that a translation should be ex-

pressed ‘‘in such a manner that it yields the intended interpretation with-

out putting the audience to unnecessary processing e¤ort.’’ He goes on to

say that

These conditions seem to provide exactly the guidance that translators have been

looking for: they determine in what respects the translation should resemble the

Simultaneous interpreting: A relevance-theoretic approach 171

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original—only in those respects that can be expected to make it adequately rele-

vant to the receptor language audience. They determine also that the translation

should be clear and natural in expression in the sense that it should not be un-

necessarily di‰cult to understand. (Gutt 2000: 107)

I think Gutt’s relevance-theoretic account of translation as interpretive

use of language can be applied to simultaneous interpreting with interest-

ing results, even taking into account the considerable di¤erences between

the two processes.

Another important source for this paper is Robin Setton’s Simultane-

ous Interpretation: A Cognitive-Pragmatic Analysis (1999), which explains

SI in terms of relevance theory, mental models theory and frame theory.

According to Setton, given that RT has focused chiefly on conversationsand SI involves longer texts in a task-oriented perspective, it is necessary

to draw on other pragmatic theories besides RT. He proposes a cognitive

model for SI which is ‘‘necessarily a hybrid of best available theories’’

(Setton 1999: 64).

I believe the relevance-theoretic framework to be su‰cient for the pur-

poses at hand, so other pragmatic theories will not be taken into account.

I do not propose any specific cognitive model for SI, besides that pro-

posed in relevance theory for ostensive-inferential communication.

2. Di¤erences between translation and simultaneous interpreting

There are important di¤erences between these two forms of interlingual

interpretive use of language. In translation there is usually adequate

knowledge of the informative intention of the author of the source text.

The translator can do research on the author, his life and work, any his-

torical events involved, the characters or people mentioned, as well as use

dictionaries, encyclopedias, the internet, etc., to resolve any di‰culties. In

the case of living authors, sometimes she can consult with the author him-self. On the other hand, with the exception of highly technical texts, the

translator may only have a very vague idea of who her addressees are.

As a result, she has no obvious way of ascertaining what would be rele-

vant to them.

In contrast, in SI there is immediate knowledge both of the addressees

and of the speaker since they are in full view of the interpreters. It is rela-

tively straightforward for interpreters to infer what would be relevant for

the audience, either because it is usually closely related to what the con-ference in question is about (medicine, shipbuilding, marketing, sales

training, etc.,) or because of audience reaction.

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Interpreters can see the speaker, which helps guide them towards

his communicative intentions. Sometimes it is even possible to meet with

the speaker before his lecture. Nevertheless, in ‘‘addition to dealing briefly

with large amounts of new information, conference interpreters also

briefly represent many di¤erent Speakers’’ (Setton 1999: 17). It is not al-

ways possible for the interpreter to acquire background information on

each speaker or on the work he will be presenting. Each speaker mayhave di¤erent informative intentions, as well as di¤erent ways of commu-

nicating these intentions, and the interpreter has to very quickly adapt to

each one.

Interpreters, contrary to translators, also frequently deal with source

text produced by non-native speakers, which can cause all sorts of di‰-

culties, ranging from thick accents and incomprehensible syntax to misuse

of technical terminology.

In translation there can be discrepancies in time, something which doesnot occur in interpreting. A translated source text may have been written

for a medieval audience, a nineteenth century audience and so on. In SI

that does not happen: the source text is always contemporary and that is

an advantage in terms of accessibility of contextual assumptions. Impor-

tant aspects of the required cognitive environment tend to be shared by

speakers, interpreters and audience. Moreover, in translation there can

be an original audience, the audience the text was written for, and a re-

ceptor audience, who may be reading the translation centuries later. InSI, these audiences are one and the same. This can make a di¤erence in

the sense that the translator, but not the interpreter, has to think of con-

textual assumptions and cognitive e¤ects intended for the original audi-

ence, judge if they are optimally relevant to her addressees and try to get

them across in her translation. The interpreter, on the other hand, is deal-

ing with the original audience, and all cognitive e¤ects are intended for

this same audience.

Interpreting is frequently compared to a high-wire act in a circus, andaptly so. That is another di¤erence between translation and SI. The trans-

lator not only has time to come up with interesting solutions to di‰cult

problems but also has knowledge of the entire text, both what comes be-

fore and what comes after the di‰cult passage. Interpreters deal with

real-time communication and do not know how the speaker will continue

his speech. If a speaker makes a pun or says something like ‘‘In my coun-

try there is a saying that goes . . . ,’’ the interpreter must decide on what to

do without knowing if the pun or saying will be significant later. If theinterpreter is quick enough to find an equivalent pun or saying in the tar-

get language, she will usually have to completely replace the words. In

these cases, it is the meaning or moral of the saying that will have the


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most cognitive e¤ects, not the exact words used to convey it. Let’s say an

English speaker says

(1) As we say in my country, don’t count your chickens before they are

hatched.

A good Portuguese interpreter with excellent reflexes might say Nao se

canta vitoria antes do tempo. (meaning that victory shouldn’t be sung be-

fore it is certain). All is well if the speaker goes on to something else. But

what if he starts talking about why the chicken crossed the road and how

many eggs you should put in one basket, or use all sorts of chicken-and-

egg metaphors? What can the interpreter do then with her image of un-

sung victories? Translators never have this problem.

3. E¤ort

In SI, e¤ort is a very important issue. There are several procedures put in

place by the International Association of Conference Interpreters (known

by its French acronym AIIC) in order to conserve the e¤ort expended byinterpreters in an attempt to guarantee the quality of the work.

Daniel Gile’s E¤orts Model of SI (Gile 1995) also deals with the allo-

cation and conservation of e¤ort. It is based on the idea that there is a

limited processing capacity available to interpreters which must be shared

between three types of e¤ort: listening and analyzing; short-term memory;

and production. These e¤orts must be in a state of balance for successful

interpreting. When one of them increases, one or both of the others su¤er

as a result.E¤ort is also a central concept in relevance theory. The notions of rele-

vance and optimal relevance are defined in terms of e¤ort and e¤ects.

Relevance is a positive function of cognitive e¤ects and a negative func-

tion of processing e¤ort. In order for an utterance to be optimally rele-

vant, it must be ‘‘relevant enough to be worth the audience’s processing

e¤ort’’ and it must be

the most relevant one compatible with the communicator’s abilities and prefer-

ences . . . It is therefore in [the communicator’s] interest—within the limits of her

own capabilities and preferences—to make her ostensive stimulus as easy as pos-

sible for the audience to understand, and to provide evidence not just for the cog-

nitive e¤ects she aims to achieve in her audience but also for further cognitive

e¤ects which, by holding his attention, will help her achieve her goal. (Wilson

and Sperber, 2004: 612)

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Applying this notion to SI, we could say that the source speaker should

try to make his communication optimally relevant for the audience, and

the interpreter, in turn, should also make her interpretation into the target

language optimally relevant for the audience. The speaker’s utterances

achieve relevance on their own, and the interpreter’s utterances achieve

relevance by virtue of their interpretive resemblance with the original ut-

terances. This would mean that there are two communicative acts takingplace: one between speaker and audience and another between interpreter

and audience (more specifically those members of the audience using the

interpreter’s services).

According to Miriam Shlesinger,

. . . the interpreter is but an intermediate addressee. The implications of this status

for comprehension and subsequent transmission of the speaker’s message are self-

evident: . . . the more it refers directly to the extralinguistic situation, the less it is

apt to be comprehended by any but the intended addressees. In other words, the

more assumptions the speaker makes about his hearer’s prior knowledge of the

situation, the more di‰cult it will be for the interpreter to reconstruct the mes-

sage. (Shlesinger 1994: 226)

In order to overcome this di‰culty the interpreter must study the subject

being discussed at the conference; she must have lists, glossaries, papers,

dictionaries, etc., all available to her. These will help her to access the

same contextual assumptions as the audience, which is usually made upof experts in that specific field, and to reach the same implicatures as

them.

In relevance theory, other things being equal, the more processing ef-

fort involved in understanding an utterance, the less relevant that utter-

ance becomes, to the point that hearers may eventually abandon the

search for relevance altogether because the processing e¤ort involved is

greater than the cognitive e¤ects to be achieved. Interpreters cannot, for

obvious reasons, abandon the search for relevance if the source speech in-volves extra processing e¤ort.

Some speakers are very di‰cult to interpret. They may, for example,

speak too fast. They may use regional expressions which have no mean-

ing for someone from another region. They may have a very thick accent

or not speak the o‰cial conference language well. They may speak too

low, or too loud, or too far from the microphone, or too near it. They

may have speech di‰culties, such as a stutter or a lisp. The interpreter

will nevertheless put in the e¤ort and pass the speech on to the addressees.In the cases listed above, there will usually be, for the interpreter, extra

cognitive e¤ects for extra e¤ort: she will better understand the source

speech and therefore be able to translate it. Moreover, she will be sparing


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her addressees the processing e¤ort resulting from accents, sound quality,

etc., thereby increasing the relevance of her own speech.

On the other hand, if the extra e¤ort expended by the interpreter truly

involves extra intended cognitive e¤ects for the audience, then she must

try to produce these e¤ects in her interpretation of the speech. Let’s say

that a speaker is from a region of the country which is not usually repre-

sented in the world of international conferences. He might then use re-gional terms and a strong regional accent to make a point of the fact

that his region is making an important contribution to the discussion.

Here’s a concrete example: A former president of the Brazilian Electricity

Company was from the north of the country, from a state near the Ama-

zon Forest, an agricultural area not usually associated with technology.

In every speech he made a point of employing regional terms, regional

sayings, and regional examples. Since most interpreters in Brazil live in

Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo or Brasilia (and indeed that’s where most con-ferences take place), they couldn’t understand many of the references in

his speeches, much less know how to translate them into other languages.

Needless to say he was not very popular with the interpreting community.

However, since these terms and references were there for a reason, i.e.,

there were implicatures to be derived, it was important to translate if

not the terms, then at least the general idea that he was proud of where

he came from, that he was a simple man in touch with his origins, etc.

These are some of the implicatures that Brazilian addressees might derivefrom hearing him, even if they could not themselves understand all the

references. This of course involves other issues besides extra cognitive ef-

fects for extra e¤ort. It involves the crucial question of when the inter-

preter should resort to explicating an implicature. I will deal with this

issue later.

The extra e¤ort for extra cognitive e¤ects expended by the interpreters

in the examples above is di‰cult to quantify, but there are studies which

attempt to measure cognitive workload in SI using indicators such as pu-pil dilation and cardiac activity (Tommola and Niemi 1986; Klonowicz

1990, cited in Yagi 1999: 5–6). Less exact behavioral responses such as

attitude and posture in the booth can also be observed. When the source

speech is especially di‰cult, interpreters may tilt their head towards the

sound source, sit up, close their eyes, increase the volume on their head-

sets, or pick up a binocular to get a closer view of the speaker. One typi-

cal sign of exhaustion is an interpreter who starts interpreting into the

source language or, in other words, starts repeating what the speaker issaying. She may do that for a few seconds until her colleague nudges her

or until the addressees start looking back at the booth with a perplexed

expression.

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4. The role of the interpreter

4.1 User expectations

At international conferences, when addressees can understand the source

language and are therefore not using the interpreter’s services, they follow

the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure in processing the source

speech. They will allow for hesitations, backtracking, gaps, strange vo-

cabulary, etc. This is what they do in ordinary communication. The pro-

cedure is defined as follows: ‘‘Follow the path of least e¤ort in computingcognitive e¤ects: test interpretive hypotheses (disambiguations, reference

resolutions, implicatures, etc.,) in order of accessibility. Stop when your

expectations of relevance are satisfied’’ (Wilson and Sperber, 2004: 613).

Hearers stop when their expectations of relevance are satisfied, or give up

when they cannot be satisfied.

Hearers listening to simultaneous interpreting seem to be less tolerant.

They frequently expect to hear full, complete sentences, free of tics, hesi-

tations, or strange vocabulary, with fluency and good diction and gener-ally what interpreters call a smooth delivery. Although hearers, of course,

realize that the speech does not originate with the interpreters, they tend

to take any of the lapses listed above as being the interpreter’s, not the

source speaker’s.

The listener is lacking one of the most crucial means of assessing quality: an

understanding of the message. Thus, for example, smooth delivery may create

the false impression of quality when much of the message may in fact be distorted

or even missing. On the other hand, a listener may misjudge a very faithful ren-

dering as flawed when in fact it is the source that accounts for its shortcomings.

(Shlesinger 1994: 127)

We can explain that in relevance-theoretic terms and say that the expect-

ations of hearers with regards to communication are unique when theyare listening to SI. The interpreter’s task would then be to endeavor to

filter out all the interferences present in normal human communication,

producing a speech that aims to be optimally relevant in all its aspects,

as if it had been prepared in advance, edited and recorded to perfection.

What many SI users seem to expect is something akin to a speech read on

radio, by professional announcers.

Another aspect of SI users’ expectations has to do with the role of the

interpreter. Should she interfere in the source speech, adapt it, spell out asexplicatures material that was merely implicit in the source speech, should

she try to make herself invisible, a sort of ghost of the source speaker, or

should she make her own speech a literal translation of the original one?


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Addressees’ expectations vary in this respect and can also be explained in

relevance-theoretic terms.

Published studies of user expectations (Moser, P. 1995; Kurz 1989;

Meak 1990, cited in Kurz 2002) tend to agree that expectations vary ac-

cording to conference size and type, age of users, previous experience with

SI, subject of conference, etc. Moser, P. (1995) states that the ‘‘less tech-

nical a conference, the weaker the requirement for completeness’’ and‘‘the more technical the meeting, the greater the preference for the literal

reproduction of papers and debates’’ (Moser, P. 1995: 24).

In an article entitled Quality in simultaneous interpreting, Myriam

Shlesinger says that

for the Chinese delegation to the UN, for example, the demand for a rather literal

rendering supersedes style and fluency . . . Thus, the way quality is understood by

the Chinese delegates is very di¤erent from the way it is seen by many pro-

fessional interpreters . . . TV audiences [on the other hand] are very demanding;

yet, for them, completeness is less of an issue than smooth delivery and clarity.

(Shlesinger 1997: 127)

We could explain this by saying that interpreters should take into account

the degree of faithfulness and type of cognitive e¤ects relevant for each

kind of audience, as well as the processing e¤ort the audience is willing

or able to put into understanding the interpretation. A Chinese inter-

preter at the UN who tried to make her interpretation sound fluent andnatural would not be doing her job, since what would be relevant for her

listeners would be the literal rendering of the source text. Someone inter-

preting the Academy Awards ceremony for Brazilian television would

face the opposite challenge: if she tried to translate everything literally,

she would necessarily sacrifice ease, fluency and appropriate intona-

tion. The audience, in this case, considers relevant an interpretation that

sounds like an original source speech, even if this means part of the mes-

sage may be lost. For this type of audience, the most important cognitivee¤ects have to do with naturalness, not with accuracy. The Academy

Awards interpreter who attempted a literal translation would be demand-

ing more processing e¤ort than her addressees are able or willing to em-

ploy, thereby decreasing the relevance of her interpretation.

Since the audience does not speak the source language, they cannot

know what the speaker is saying or how he is saying it. They cannot judge

his style or derive any cognitive e¤ects from the manner in which he

enunciates his utterances. It might be part of the interpreter’s task to passthis information on to the audience if her intuitions tell her it will help

them achieve the intended cognitive e¤ects. If a speaker is angry, for ex-

ample, this can sometimes be derived from his tone of voice (along with

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other clues, such as facial expression, gestures, etc., which would be per-

ceived by the addressees without the interpreter’s help). The interpreter

must judge if it is relevant for her audience to know that the speaker is

using an angry tone of voice, if it will help them achieve the intended cog-

nitive e¤ects. She must then modulate her own tone of voice accordingly.

An opposite example is a speaker who is trying to sound calm and sooth-

ing, and attempting to produce an e¤ect on his audience by doing so. Theinterpreter must also use a calm and soothing tone of voice or the e¤ect

will be lost.

A case in point is that of an American psychologist and writer called

Brian Weiss who is an expert in past lives therapy. He uses hypnotism to

take patients back to their past lives, where they can then find out what

traumatized them and be cured when brought back from hypnotic trance.

In his lectures, he hypnotizes the audience and then calls someone on

stage for a demonstration. When hypnotizing the audience he is on stage,using a microphone, taking the audience through hypnotism procedures

(‘‘you are relaxed, your eyes feel heavy, imagine you are walking through

a garden,’’ etc.,) in a very low and soothing voice. In his lectures in Brazil

the audience was mainly composed of Brazilians who didn’t speak En-

glish and were therefore listening to the interpretation. The interpreters

had to use the same tone of voice as Dr. Weiss and carefully choose their

words when describing the places he was talking about, in order to pro-

duce in the audience the intended cognitive (and other) e¤ects, of whichthe main one was that they would all be hypnotized by the end of the ses-

sion. In this case, the choice facing the interpreters was an obvious one:

the specific words used by the source speaker, and even the message,

weren’t very relevant. What was most relevant was the tone of voice, the

description of tranquil, idyllic scenery, the fact that the addressee was be-

ing led through an imagined path, the gradual and subtle changes in into-

nation as the session went on, etc. The role of the interpreter was then to

reproduce these in the target language, distancing herself if necessaryfrom the original speech.

‘‘Using her knowledge of the audience, the translator has to make as-

sumptions about its cognitive environment and about the potential rele-

vance that any aspects of the interpretation would have in that cognitive

environment’’ (Gutt 2000: 116). This of course does not mean that the in-

terpreter will always be able to accurately judge what would be optimally

relevant for her audience or what the shared cognitive environment

includes. She makes this decision based mainly on information shecan obtain from seeing the audience and the audience’s reactions, from

knowledge of the subject of the conference, and from using her own

intuition and common sense. As Gutt says,


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our account does not predict that the principle of relevance makes all translation

successful any more than it predicts that all ostensive communication is successful.

In fact, it predicts that failure of communication in general is likely to arise where

the translator’s assumptions about the cognitive environment of the receptor lan-

guage audience are inaccurate. (Gutt 2000: 118)

The following is an example of failure resulting from an interpreter’s

misjudgment of optimal relevance for her audience. There is an American

expert in sales training for big retail companies who travels the world pre-

senting his methods and has been to Brazil several times. He is a very di-

rect and rather rude person and uses language not commonly employed

in conferences. As a result, many interpreters replace what he says withmilder versions, causing him to fly into a rage and fire the interpreter in

question if he finds out. He has the habit, and it is part of his technique,

to stop in front of a member of the audience he thinks isn’t paying ade-

quate attention to his lecture and say,

(2) Who do you think you are? You’re just a piece of shit. I’m here to

change that so you should pay attention to what I have to say.

One interpreter translated his ‘‘you’re just a piece of shit’’ by voce e um

idiota (‘you’re an idiot’). He found out and the interpreter was fired, never

to be seen again at any of his lectures.

Moreover, he was right. The insult could have been translated by lots

of equivalent ones and he knew perfectly well that a literal translation of‘‘piece of shit’’ did not exist in Portuguese. The intended cognitive e¤ects

of his utterance did not depend on the words themselves but on their

strength as insults and that is what the interpreter should have tried to

maintain in her translation. She softened his insult, thereby producing dif-

ferent cognitive e¤ects for the hearers. Insults of various sorts are part of

his technique. He believes in bullying people into action, in humiliating

them so they will take charge of their lives and show some ambition. This

may be a very American way of seeing things, and the interpreter mayhave thought it wouldn’t play well in Brazil, where ambition is still seen

with suspicion and people tend to be cordial in most situations. She made

the change, then, taking into account what she judged would be relevant

for her audience. Nevertheless, since her assumptions were inaccurate, her

interpretation failed and she committed a rather serious error which in

the end caused her to lose a client.

4.2 Explicating implicatures

Andrzej Kopczynski breaks up the relationship between the three par-

ticipants in a conference (speaker, interpreter, and addressee) into three

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possibilities, which can be stated in relevance-theoretic terms. The first

one involves technical conferences, when the speaker’s ‘‘set of presup-

positions, values and background’’ or, in relevance-theoretic terms,

contextual assumptions, are the same as those of the addressees, and the

interpreter is the odd man out, so to speak. The main implicatures

and intended cognitive e¤ects are related to ‘‘the content of [the source

speech] and precision of terminology rather than its style.’’ The secondpossibility is when the interpreter shares the same set of contextual as-

sumptions as the speaker and is interpreting for what Kopczynski calls a

‘‘far removed culture.’’ In this case, she ‘‘may be expected to expand on

what the speaker is saying in order to explain culture-specific phenomena

and frequently readjust the style [of the source speech] in order to comply

with the target culture.’’ The third possibility is when the interpreter

shares contextual assumptions with the addressees, in which case ‘‘she is

entitled to make shortcuts in rendering the meaning of [the source speech]. . .’’ (Kopczynski 1994: 90). In all these strategies, the interpreter is being

guided by the communicative and cognitive principles of relevance. The

second case is the most interesting one: when interpreter and speaker

share contextual assumptions not accessible to the audience. This is

when the interpreter may be allowed or even expected to provide as expli-

catures material that was merely implicit in the original text. Here is a

concrete example:

(3) Speaker (in Portuguese): Fernandinho Beira-Mar nao e tao poderoso

quanto dizem.

‘Fernandinho Beira-Mar is not as powerful

as they say’

Spanish interpreter: FERNANDINHO BEIRA-MAR, QUE ESUN FAMOSO NARCOTRAFICANTE BRASILENO, . . . .

English interpreter: Fernandinho Beira-Mar, a notorious Brazilian

drug lord, . . .

Both interpreters thought it necessary, in order to satisfy the audience’s

expectations of relevance, to include an additional explicature for their

audiences, made up of Spanish and English-speaking people who wouldn’t

necessarily be familiar with the who’s who of drug gangs in Brazil. To

Brazilians this explicature, had it been provided by the speaker, would

have seemed silly and unnecessary. It would simply be old information,

and would not strengthen, contradict or eliminate contextual assumptions

held by Brazilian addressees; nor would it yield any contextual implica-tions for them. It would therefore be a gratuitous demand on the audi-

ence’s processing e¤ort. To foreigners, however, it was new and essential

information. The interpreters’ interference in the source speech aimed to


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put all hearers on equal footing by making the intended contextual as-

sumptions accessible. The entire audience could then derive the intended

cognitive e¤ect, achieved by contradicting the assumption, widely-held by

Brazilians, that Fernandinho Beira-Mar is an all-powerful criminal.

In the example above, the solution found by the interpreters was e¤ec-

tive. Yet, there may be a risk in explicating implicatures. Weak or strong

implicatures are the responsibility of the communicator: the stronger theimplicature, the more responsibility the communicator assumes. If the in-

terpreter explicates, she is attributing to the speaker full responsibility for

what may have been only a weak implicature of the original. Explication

also limits the range of interpretations, which may be vast in terms of

weak implicatures.

Foreigners who come to Brazil quickly learn (or are told by their Bra-

zilian hosts) that Brazilians tend to be at least half an hour late for every-

thing, including international conferences. Brazilians don’t always knowthat this is not the case in other countries, and so if a speaker says, as

they frequently do:

(4) Let’s meet here tomorrow at 10:00 am British time, not Brazilian

time,

it might be necessary for the interpreter to explain to her hearers that he

means they should be punctual and not that they should use GMT to de-termine when they should be there. The interpreter will have reached the

implicated premise that Brazilians are always late and come to the impli-

cated conclusion that the speaker wants the audience to be punctual.

Nevertheless, she may believe that these implicated premises and conclu-

sions will not be accessible to the addressees because they don’t have much

contact with foreigners, or don’t go to many conferences and aren’t aware

that this is a recurrent joke among international speakers. She may then

decide to help them come to the intended implicature, which is ‘‘Don’t belate.’’ Nonetheless, although she will have managed to pass on to her au-

dience the stronger intended implicature, she will have lost weaker impli-

catures. These could be that the speaker is knowledgeable about the ways

of Brazilians, that he is making a joke, that he finds these ways quaint

and amusing rather than annoying, that he is calling attention in a hu-

morous way to the fact that the audience was late that morning, etc. All

these weaker implicatures, as well as many others, will have been lost in

translation.

The move from implicit to explicit communication alters the strength of the com-

munication. Good jokes and poems achieve most of their e¤ects through a wide

range of weak implicatures: they come much closer to showing than to meaning.

Spelling them out converts them to cases of meaning, thus destroying their infinite

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suggestions. The move from implicit to explicit communication alters the relation

between communicator and audience. Relevance theory implies a general strategy

for deciding what to make explicit and what to leave implicit. You should leave

implicit everything you can trust your audience to supply with less e¤ort than

would be needed to process an explicit linguistic prompt. The fact that you have

chosen to spell something out is therefore relevant on the social or interpersonal

level: it implies that you don’t trust your hearer to work it out for himself. (Wil-

son 2002a, lecture 7: 12)

Interpreters do not always have the choice of whether to provide expli-

catures of this type. SI is performed under strong constraints of time and

interpreters rarely have the luxury of including explanations in their ren-

dering of the source speech. An illustration of this is the case of a Brazil-

ian speaker at a large human resources conference in Rio de Janeiro. His

entire lecture was based on a comparison between the ideal human re-sources manager and Bernardinho. This was at the 10th World Congress

on Human Resources Management, an extremely large gathering of

thousands of people from all over the world, most of whom had no idea

who Bernardinho was. The English interpreter was able, at some point, to

squeeze in the information that Bernardinho was the coach for the Brazil-

ian men’s volleyball team at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens. Ber-

nardinho is very famous in Brazil for having transformed first the wom-

en’s, then the men’s volleyball teams into world champions in a countrywhere the only sport considered worthy of the name is football (the men’s

team went on to win the Olympic gold medal). He is also famous for the

special relationship he develops with his players, playing alternately the

parts of technical advisor, strict father figure, understanding friend, and

older and experienced brother. These traits of his personality are well

known, greatly admired and frequently mentioned by players and sports

commentators, and were part of the implicated premises of this lecture.

Achieving the implicated conclusions depended on accessing these impli-cated premises, none of which were provided by the speaker or could be

provided by the interpreter. All her audience knew was that the compari-

son was some sort of vague and confusing sports analogy.

5. Errors in simultaneous interpreting

It is important to state that SI is a fallible process. Errors can appear even

in the output of experienced interpreters working under good conditions.

According to Gile, errors are frequently found in speeches that do notpresent any obvious di‰culty. ‘‘In interpreting literature . . . errors are

rarely mentioned. When they are mentioned, authors have a tendency to


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attribute them to inadequate working conditions’’3 (Gile 1995: 81, trans-

lation my own).

According to Setton, many studies of SI lack a ‘‘pragmatic dimen-

sion, particularly in the definition of errors’’ (Setton 1999: 46). Relevance

theory can be used to provide this pragmatic dimension to the identifica-

tion, and perhaps prevention, of errors.

5.1 Pragmatic aridity4

A ‘‘simultaneous interpreter must sometimes formulate on the basis of

partial meanings, either because the utterance is still incomplete or be-

cause, not being addressed, she receives less than the full meaning avail-

able to the addressees’’ (Setton 1999: 21). One way of overcoming this dif-

ficulty is by relying heavily on pragmatic inference. Interpreters are

greedy when it comes to clues to speaker’s meaning and will use anythingthey can get their hands on. The absence of these clues can cause errors

and prevent interpreters from using strategies such as anticipation.5

The notorious di‰culty of interpreting recited written text may

also stem from the fact that when reading a text out loud and in public,

speakers tend to suppress pragmatic markers present in spontaneous

speech, such as intonation, pauses, hesitations, gestures and facial expres-

sions. All these are precious clues to the speaker’s meaning, on which in-

terpreters depend.Another cause for pragmatic aridity is an interpreting situation in

which the speaker is not visible to the interpreters. Seeing the speaker is

so important in SI that the code of professional standards of the Interna-

tional Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) states that ‘‘inter-

preters must have a view of the meeting room, the speaker and any visual

aids he might be using’’ (AIIC Code of Professional Standards: 3). In

relevance-theoretic terms, when interpreters cannot see the speaker, they

miss many pragmatic clues, which increases the e¤ort they must make tograsp the speaker’s meaning.

5.2 Wrong conceptual address

Interpreters must also be up-to-date with the latest terms used not only in

technical conferences, but also in the media, movies, and pop culture. An

example of an error of this type:

(5) Speaker (in Portuguese): Me refiro ao eixo do mal . . .

Interpreter: I am referring to the evil axis . . .

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In relevance theory, mentally represented concepts are seen as involv-

ing a conceptual address, which gives access to a linguistic entry, a logical

entry, and an encyclopedic entry. The word or term which encodes this

concept gives the hearer access to this mental representation. In the exam-

ple above, the interpreter translated eixo do mal as ‘‘evil axis.’’ However,

what the speaker was referring to was not an evil axis, but the expression

‘‘axis of evil,’’ coined by President Bush to refer to Iran, Iraq, and NorthKorea and translated by the Brazilian media as eixo do mal. The speaker

was using this expression metalinguistically, quoting Bush’s use of the

same expression. As it was used metalinguistically, it needed to be trans-

lated by the exact corresponding term in English, and the fact that this

was not done put the hearers on the track of the wrong interpretation.

As noted above, when a hearer hears a word or an expression, this gives

him access to a conceptual address where information about the objects

described by that word or expression is stored. ‘‘On this approach, a con-ceptual address is thus a point of access to the logical, encyclopedic and

linguistic information which may be needed in the processing of logical

forms containing that address’’ (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 86). So in

hearing ‘‘evil axis’’ the hearer will access a linguistic entry, a logical entry,

and an encyclopedic entry which will help him form an ad hoc concept

concerning roughly an axis that is evil. Nevertheless the Portuguese ex-

pression eixo do mal, does not refer to an axis that is evil, (which would

be eixo mau, with no preposition and with the adjective mau, meaningbad or evil, and not the noun mal ) but to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.

This becomes clear when we hear the continuation of the speech:

(6) Speaker: . . . me refiro ao eixo do mal, paıses que representam um risco

para a seguranca de todos nos.

‘I am referring to the axis of evil, to countries which pose a security

threat to all of us.’

It might be that the hearer would eventually get from the ad hoc conceptof an axis that is evil to the metalinguistic use of the expression ‘‘axis of

evil.’’ He would most likely do this in his search for relevance: since ‘‘evil

axis’’ wouldn’t be relevant enough, he would search for relevance in the

interpreter’s utterance elsewhere and would most likely get to President

Bush’s ‘‘axis of evil.’’ Nevertheless, the interpreter’s error made her utter-

ance less relevant by increasing the processing e¤ort required of her

hearer. If she had chosen the correct translation, ‘‘axis of evil,’’ her audi-

ence could have had immediate access to the conceptual address for thisvery expression, which would include a linguistic entry, with syntactic and

phonological information; a logical entry, which could be something sim-

ilar to the speaker’s own explanation: ‘‘axis of evil: countries which pose


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a threat’’ and an encyclopedic entry, which could include information

about President Bush’s use of the expression to refer to Iran, Iraq and

North Korea, as well as information about the Middle East, terrorists,

Sadam Hussein and Kim Jong-il, the DMZ, Shiites, the Republican

Party, WMDs, and so on. This would help the audience process the rest

of the sentence using the implicated premises and achieve the intended

cognitive e¤ects.

5.3 Taking liberties with contextual assumptions

A further error that can be explained in relevance-theoretic terms is the

inadequate inclusion of explicatures provided by the interpreter for clari-

fication, but not intended by the speaker. In the example of the drug lord

mentioned in section 4, Fernandinho Beira-Mar could have been de-

scribed by the interpreter as a terrible and dangerous person, a hardenedcriminal, a murderer, someone who should be kept o¤ the streets at all

costs, all of which are opinions probably shared by the speaker (and by

the Brazilian audience). Nevertheless, these opinions were not part of the

original speech, were not intended by the speaker, provided no contextual

assumptions necessary for correctly processing the speech and achieving

the intended cognitive e¤ects and as such would have constituted an error

if the interpreter had included them.

5.4 Irrelevance

The interpreter must judge the relevance of the source text for her audi-

ence not only in terms of the importance of the intended cognitive e¤ects

but also in terms of there being any cognitive e¤ects at all. Not everything

a speaker says at a conference is relevant for the audience. There may be

things like

(7) ‘‘Next slide, please.’’ or ‘‘Could someone get the lights?’’

which have no cognitive e¤ects for the addressees (unless, of course, the

person responsible for these actions is listening to the translation) and

will only increase the processing e¤ort they must make. The speaker may

be talking to himself, as in

(8) ‘‘Where did I put my pen?’’ or ‘‘Why doesn’t this thing work?’’

and not intend to have his words translated.Nevertheless, sometimes speakers use such expressions for a purpose

and there may be implicatures to be derived. It may, for example, be a

strategy for putting the audience at ease and making them see him as a

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friendly and approachable fellow. The interpreter would then translate

these snippets, for they would achieve cognitive e¤ects for her audience

by contradicting the assumption that Dr. Such and Such is arrogant and

aloof.

6. Conclusion

In SI performance terms, we will claim that the improvements and changes which

are observed with training and experience . . . are more readily explained by a de-

velopment in the skilled use of pragmatic and knowledge resources than by the

improved coordination of limited processing capacity understood as the tempo-

rary storage, transformation and retrieval of linguistic forms. (Setton 1999: 3–4)

If the above statement is true, and I believe it is, then it should be pos-

sible to use pragmatic theory, and particularly relevance theory, to makethe path towards the ‘‘skilled use of pragmatic and knowledge resources’’

easier and shorter for novice interpreters. This would of course benefit

these interpreters and their trainers, but it might also contribute to the

improvement of SI services in general, at least in the long run. ‘‘A good

grasp of the relevance-theoretic framework not only deepens the transla-

tor’s understanding of the problems she encounters, but is indeed a pre-

requisite for the proper application of any rules and principles of transla-

tion she might come across’’ (Gutt 2000: 224). Relevance theory can helpinterpreters have a better idea of the complexity of their task and make

them more aware of the importance for the practice of interpreting of

concepts like contextual assumptions, the di¤erence between linguistically

expressed meaning and intended meaning, etc.

These notions, or at least their practical consequences, may be, in one

way or another, part of the knowledge and proficiency interpreters intui-

tively acquire with years of practice. Nevertheless, if explicitly stated they

might be grasped earlier, thereby making the trainee interpreter’s life lesspainful (and perhaps helping senior interpreters as well).

It would be stimulating to see more studies in this area, and perhaps an

interesting one would be to compare the output of trainee or novice inter-

preters with that of experienced interpreters in relevance-theoretic terms.

The methodological challenges of such a study may be a reason why it

has, to my knowledge, not yet been carried out. Using real interpreting

data as a corpus may involve too many variables, while a simulation may

be too artificial to provide any useful results.Nevertheless, if indeed, as Setton claims, improvements in an interpre-

ter’s performance can be explained by a better use of pragmatic resources,

then it might be possible to train interpreters to use these resources right


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from the beginning of their careers, instead of having them thrashing

about for years making avoidable mistakes.

Yet, what Setton proposes is not the same as what Gutt proposes.

‘‘There is no suggestion that the technicalities of pragmatic theory should

be introduced into the SI training classroom . . . it would be perverse to

teach the nature of presupposition, or Gricean maxims, for application

on-line’’ (Setton 1999: 283).The di¤erent perspectives illustrated here by Gutt and Setton could be

due to the fact that Gutt is referring to translation, a much more theory-

driven practice, and Setton to conference interpreting, usually treated as

a practical skill, to be acquired without much reference to theory. Inter-

preting courses are usually based on practice and on practical skills,

such as voice modulation techniques, terminology, note-taking techni-

ques, breathing exercises, di¤erent modes of interpreting (simultaneous,

consecutive, and whispered interpreting), etc. Setton’s solution is to intro-duce ‘‘a wide range of Speakers, discourse types, and situations, particu-

larly in the finishing stages, so that students may naturally become aware

of the value of extratextual and background information, and develop a

sensitivity to the intentional cues (and non-standard speech patterns) of

di¤erent Speakers’’ (Setton 1999: 283).

My own experience as an interpreter and a lecturer has convinced me

that, contrary to Setton’s beliefs, interpreters do benefit from being intro-

duced to a relevance-theoretic approach to their job. This conclusion ispersonal and based on anecdotal evidence, but it might indicate that

using relevance theory in the classroom could have beneficial e¤ects. It can

give student interpreters a better understanding of what is expected of

them and make them more aware of the importance of a shared cognitive

environment, of implicatures and explicatures, of which clues they should

be looking for (both from the speaker and in terms of audience reaction),

of which are the intended cognitive e¤ects, and so on.

It may also help interpreters when preparing for a conference since, asSetton says, for the interpreter contextualization usually begins before in-

put, sometimes days or even weeks before, when she gets the agenda of the

meeting, the list of participants, papers, etc., (Setton 1999: 89). Likewise,

when the interpreter has the chance of meeting with the speaker before

the conference, awareness of these issues may guide her to use this time,

which is necessarily short, more to her advantage.

Simultaneous interpreting is a di‰cult and demanding task. It is also

an important one in an increasingly globalized world in which languagesand cultures come into contact like never before. Interpreters need all the

help they can get, and relevance theory may be an excellent way of pro-

viding this help.

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Notes

1. I will follow Setton on the use of personal pronouns: ‘‘In Relevance, Sperber & Wilson

adopt the convention of a female speaker and a male hearer. Since most conference in-

terpreters are women, and most conference participants are men, we will use the femi-

nine pronoun for the interpreter and the masculine for both speakers and addressees’’

(Setton 1999: 343). In this paper, I refer to what Setton calls addressees both as ad-

dressees and as audience, by which I mean an audience at a conference, listening to the

interpretation through headsets.

2. Gutt di¤erentiates between ‘‘interlingual descriptive use’’ (2000: 56) and ‘‘interlingual in-

terpretive use’’ (2000: 105). The first term refers to technical translations of instruction

manuals, and to translations of brochures, road signs, notices, advertisements etc. Ac-

cording to this distinction, in interlingual descriptive use the source text is not impor-

tant. In most cases, the reader either doesn’t know or doesn’t care if there is a source

text. The goal of this type of translation is to impart some specific knowledge to the

reader: directions on how to get somewhere, on how to build something, on how to op-

erate a piece of machinery, etc. Gutt also refers to these as covert translations. In covert

translation the source text may even be abandoned and a completely new text created in

the target language by a qualified person who is not necessarily a translator. This dis-

tinction does not seem to apply to SI, since there is always a visible source speaker, and

therefore a source text, and the interpreter, not being the one for whom the speech is in-

tended, cannot throw away the original text and create a completely new rendering, not

least because she usually is not technically qualified to do so. The speech produced by

the interpreter is intended to achieve relevance by virtue of its resemblance with the

source speech and not as an autonomous text in itself, as with covert written transla-

tions.

3. «Dans les textes sur interpretation, les limites, voire les defaillances de l’interprete ne

sont que rarement mentionnees. Quand elles le sont, les auteurs ont tendance a les attrib-

uer a de mauvaises conditions de travail.» (Gile 1995: 81).

4. Setton (2002: 358).

5. Anticipation is a strategy typically used by interpreters when trying to compensate for

word order di¤erences between source language and target language. The interpreter

will produce a sentence constituent in the target language that has not yet been produced

in the source language.

References

AIIC Code of Professional Standards. www.aiic.net.

Gile, Daniel. 1995. Regards sur la Recherche en Interpretation de Conference. Paris: Presses

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Simultaneous interpreting: A relevance-theoretic approach_2005