A model of conference interpretation

Abstract

The objective of this research is to develop a model of consecutive interpretation that can cope with a number of linguistic, pragmatic, stylistic, thematic, discourse and communicative problems a conference interpreter encounters while interpreting from English into Arabic or vice versa. A linguistic corpus of one hundred page English speeches delivered at the United Nation General Assembly sessions and interpreted into Arabic is analysed. The proposed model caters for both the SL and TL communicative contexts and views the conference interpreter as a mediator who decodes the original message and encodes it appropriately. The model is tested against the collected sample of linguistic data. It has proved to be capable of identifying inconsistencies and inaccuracies in five major areas: textual, stylistic, lexical, collocation and structural; the percentage of each is statistically calculated. The stylistic aspects constitute 39.3% of the inconsistencies; these cover the deviant forms that are not acceptable in Arabic: the stylistic variants, the modes of request, and the language forms that need to be reformulated in order to be consistent with the Arabic rhetorical patterns. The inappropriate rendering of lexical items makes up 26.1% of the inconsistencies; this comprises the inappropriately rendered collocation patterns, clichés and idiomatic expressions. The structural aspects constitute 18 % of the incorrectly interpreted language forms; these are the inappropriately rendered passive and modification constructions. The textual aspects constitute 10.9% of the inconsistencies; these are the parallel constructions that are not properly handled in Arabic. Translation inaccuracies, items missed or incorrectly interpreted, constitute 5.1% of the inconsistencies.