Norms revisited
A bit more than 10 years ago, in an article for Trieste’s Interpreter’s Newsletter, I reviewed some of the literature on how the notion of norms could be applied to (conference) interpreting research. That reflection was mainly triggered by the encounter with the late Miriam Shlesinger, and her work inspired by the Israeli tradition of Descriptive Translation Studies, and by the exchanges with visiting scholars and fellow participants in the Tarragona doctoral workshops led by Anthony Pym. It also reflected a search for concepts that would guide my own translatorial behaviour as, then, a practicing conference interpreter for the EU institutions.
Subsequent professional choices then led me away from interpreting as a practice and as an area of research, even though to this day I am a frequent, grateful user of conference interpreting in the EU context. That article, however, went on to have some life of its own and various researchers were kind enough to cite it, as a convenient Reader’s Digest on what is at stake when applying the notion of translational norms to interpreting.
These introductory remarks should justify why the present volume includes a chapter by someone who, strictly speaking, is no longer a scholar nor a practitioner. As a result of that, readers will forgive if the following pages conform, at best, to the standards of a hopefully well-argued essay, rather than to those of solid scientific enquiry. Although in fact, in this volume, Daniel Gile brilliantly sums up the latter as “a will to be as thorough as possible, as rigorous as possible, systematically sceptical and self-sceptical and cautious in one’s inferences”, which I would argue applies to the former, too.
That 2005 article was itself a (re)discovery of papers dating back to the first half of the 90s by Shlesinger, Harris, Chesterman, Schjoldager and others. That first wave of interest in norms coincided, and fit in well, with a fledgling interest in interpreting in non-conference settings – an area that some of us, in Trieste but also in other training institutions (e.g. Vienna) were just discovering through, for example, the series of Critical Link conference proceedings.
And what an eye-opener that was. If you wanted to address the complexity the conference interpreter faced when dealing with political speeches and ideology, and go beyond a generic notion of rotating fidelity to the speakers’ intentions, then the challenges described in the community interpreting literature provided a wealth of cases to compare and contrast. Combined with that, the variability inherent in the notion of norms allowed you to avoid one-size-fits-all prescription when devising specific translational solutions. Applied to the classroom setting in Trieste, that led to the slightly ironical situation whereby a handful of junior academics would be training interpreters mainly for, or aspiring to, the conference market at national level and in international organisations, but would rather draw their conceptual tools from the court and community interpreting literature.
The main goal of studying norms in interpreting, as it would appear to this writer back then, could be summarized as exploiting the ‘undefining’ potential of the DTS approach, i.e. acknowledging and making sense of how variable translatorial behaviour can be diacronically and across settings. This came with two challenges: mapping the processes, in training and professional life, but also in the wider social discourse on interpreting, whereby norms are set, transmitted, and enforced; and distinguishing, in the textual evidence, what can be acribed to cognitive factors from what may reflect compliance with norms. These goal and challenges still provide the lens through which I read some of the contributions in the present volume, offering in the next few pages the occasional experience-based counterpoint.
It’s all about institutional constraints
The chapter by Monacelli and Boyd exemplifies opportunities and challenges in researching norms. The fact that the textual evidence they use comes from simulated interaction does not, in my opinion, impact heavily on the possibility to make cautious inferences from it; ultimately, the behaviour of expert agents in interactions simulated for training purposes can be assumed to reflect at least some of the professional norms and expectations obtaining on that particular type of interaction. In fact, the training purpose could even have led participants to be even more self-reflective and explicit than in a real interaction in articulating and ‘staging’ the norms.
Rather, it is the small size of the sample, barely 20 minutes of interaction overall, that justifies extreme caution in drawing any conclusions. A call for replication of this analysis is due here, for example on samples which would, ideally, be differentiated in terms of languages and cultures involved, socio-demographics and professional background of the participants, and, why not, gender of the mediator and interpreter.
Monacelli and Boyd find instances of explicit gate-keeping on the part of the mediator, who shapes various aspects of the interaction including turn taking, and does verbalize fairly articulate initial and operational norms[1] for the interpreter. Interestingly, the mediator shows some awareness of different interpretation settings and their respective, alleged initial norms, as testified by the fact that she compares the interpreter’s role with the one in court interpreting: “interpreting requirements are much more flexible than […] what you are used to in legal settings”.
On closer inspection, the requirements are nevertheless rather strict, and include a call to actively censor derogatory language, and to signal cultural difficulties (it would be interesting to know how this is done in practice – a shift of person, of tone of voice, a standard introductory phrase?). These explicit operational norms addressed to the interpreter contrast with the much simpler and confusing reference, in the mediator’s discourse addressed to another participant, to a “literal but condensed” translation (sic).
The authors conclude that what we see here is the mediator setting the code of professional practice for the interpreter, who is “integrated as a fourth element” in the otherwise triadic exchange. Underlying this, there is a teleological notion of how the interpreter can contribute to the institutional goal of the exchange, i.e. assist the mediator in policing language, so as to keep the mediation open. I would argue that there is nothing strange or even particularly ‘wrong’ in the fact that linguists’ norms or codes of practice are shaped by a variety of other actors in the institution they serve. Translatorial work for complex organisations provides plenty of examples: in fieldwork on the practice of court interpreting in a civil law system such as Italy, where proceedings are still very much paper-based, we found that operational norms for the interpreter were largely shaped by the need to obtain a usable record of proceedings, in a collective effort shared by all expert participants in the hearing and led by the presiding judge (Roncalli 2001). Similarly, consider how the reliance on interpreting into the B language and the introduction of remote interpreting in the EU institutions reflect the logistical needs of an operation of unprecedented scale. Similarly, in written translation, consider how EU translated texts usually keep the original’s sentence boundaries, even when target language adequacy would warrant changing them; the aim there is to facilitate parallel reading in multilingual meetings. Or consider how the use of institutional names in the original language in translated texts from the European Court of Justice – in fact a ‘non-translation’ operational norm – reflects the lawyers’ wish to avoid suggesting unwarranted equivalences between legal institutions.
It should also not be underestimated that norms are established over time and through a complex mechanism involving a variety of agents inside and outside the specific institution. In the case discussed by Monacelli and Boyd, we may be faced here with a particular stage of norms in the making for an institution – civil mediation – which seems to be at the intersection of legal and community settings. Indeed, the fact that the sample consists of instructional videos would warrant exploring to what extent the norms assertively set out by this particular mediator are already established, i.e. shared by the wider community of agents in this particular institution.
Saying that there is nothing inherently wrong in the fact that institutional agents shape the norms that direct the interpreter’s behaviour, and do so in line with institutional goals, does not mean that nothing can go wrong. The authors rightly focus on the mediator’s statement, in the sample, to the effect that “we try to condense the information, but you will get a literal translation”. Without wanting to read too much into a single piece of textual evidence, this points to a possible source of conflict between the expectations of one party to the exchange, and the goal-oriented condensation norm set out by the mediator. It would be interesting to see, on a larger sample, whether there are instances when participants give feedback on the interpreter’s output and negotiate a different one on the continuum between condensed and literal. More broadly, this sample is a useful reminder of the need for interpreter-training institutions to transmit a flexible range of skills, so that interpreters are equipped to comply with different initial and operational norms in different settings, and possibly able to see where norms collide, as would obviously be the case if they were instructed to ‘condense and be literal’.
It is also interesting that the mediator, who displays an expert view of how to use the interpreter’s range of skills to keep the interaction going, then resorts to a rather ‘default’ statement as to what a proper translation is (i.e. a “literal” one) when he wants to reassure the participant, who is arguably less used to working with interpreters. This points, if need be, to the prevalence of a widely held conduit norm, as illustrated elsewhere by Zwischenberger (2015).
Essentially post-modern?
As said, the interest in norms in interpreting built on DTS’s radical view of the relativity of translational prescriptions, and coincided with what Monacelli elsewhere (2015) describes as a change “in the epistemological stance taken within interpreting studies, from introspective to empiricist to constructivist”.
It can indeed be argued that this interest into how the reality of and expectations on interpreting are socially constructed reflects a post-modern approach to meaning and to knowledge in general. However, I would politely take issue with the author of chapter 2, Paola Gentile, on whether it is sound, or even productive, to qualify “conference interpreting as a post-modern profession”, especially when at the same time it is admitted that “it originated to serve the communication needs of the 20th century society”.
In fact, Gentile provides an accurate overview, based on the literature on the history of the profession, of the flashpoints in the evolution of conference interpreting, i.e. roughly ‘from intellectual feat to profession’. She rightly points out that the spaces in which a profession is carried out contribute to defining it, as does its representation in media and other cultural artifacts. However, I am less comfortable with her claim that “the evolution of conference interpreting in a non-anthropological space has led to an ill-defined collective identity of the profession”.
Firstly, it can certainly be argued that many of the spaces where conference interpreters have exercised their craft since the beginnings of the profession, e.g., typically, the seats of international organisations, are devoid of history and, by an already stretched extension, of an identity of their own. But that does not mean that there are not a myriad interactions, taking place in those allegedly “non-anthropological” spaces, between agents each of whom carries an institutional role. Dumping all the spaces ‘inhabited’ by conference interpreters into Augé’s non-anthropological category risks making us less attentive, in research, to the sometimes trivial materiality of these interactions, and to how these, in turn, shape the norms prevailing in that particular setting.
A possible research project may illustrate this point. In the early 2000s the idea was launched, and then dropped, to resort more often to liaison interpreting at the European Parliament. Had it gone through, this could have brought about a re-thinking of operational norms, for example by exposing interpreters to condensation techniques deemed unacceptable in the booth. It could even have blurred the boundary between oral and written translation, due to the different user needs at work in smaller meetings focused on drafting, where the new service was to be deployed. Researching the micro interactions around that idea between politicians, managers of interpreting services, other officials, and tracing the reasons that prevented it from materialising, implies conceptualising the institution in which this happened in much more nuanced terms than a ‘post-modern non-place’, and reconstructing the identities, cultural assumptions, motivations of participants, in other words their history. It means ascribing elements of an own culture to the organisation, despite its floating in a post-modern space.
A sweeping characterization of interpreters’ spaces also means neglecting the diacronic dimension, i.e. the fact that those who are trapped in, or lucky enough to have reached these spaces will each come with their own, layered, complex cultures and identities, and that in time a distinctive interculture may well develop among them. A more nuanced, layered notion of admittedly vague concepts such as identity and culture is probably needed here; on the latter, the groundwork laid by Hans Vermeer and later, for interpreting, by Franz Pöchhacker in the mid nineties comes to mind.
Secondly, and related to the above, we may like to say that the collective identity of the profession is ill-defined (though I prefer to speak of an inherent variability), but this should not prevent us from being aware of, and researching, some remarkably strong components of the professional infrastructure, such as interpreter-training institutions, as well as national and supranational professional organisations – on which in fact there has been some scholarly interest in recent years. Despite their varying degrees of success in representing the profession, the sheer longevity, prestige and geographical coverage of some associations – including but not limited to AIIC – warrants the hypothesis that they have had some norm-setting role. The cases of associations clustering and splitting may well point to underlying, conflicting norms upheld by members. Again, research on the micro level of industrial relations between interpreters and their employers in international organisations, if we go beyond the anectodal reference to the 1974 UN strike, and look for example at topical issues such as retour, remote interpreting, team strength, duration of assignments, could provide interesting insights and qualify the perception of a profession in the midst of an identity crisis.
I used the phrase ‘industrial relations’ deliberately, as it leads me to a third and last remark on the nevertheless well-documented chapter by Gentile. Regardless of how much we can personally relate to the in-between, mass-media shaped, liquid-à-la-Bauman identity of the interpreter as an abstract persona, this is not enough to qualify the way the interpreter’s work is organised as post-modern. In fact, my impression is exactly the opposite, i.e. that the interpreter’s work in large international organisations – or at least the couple I know – is rather an example of the positivistic rationality underlying industrial modernity. Consider the size of interpreting departments, the tendency to increase their scale in order to achieve economies, the increasingly automated methods with which assignments, shifts (yes, shifts), team compositions are planned, the automated interfaces for the recruitment of free-lances; consider further how the individual interpreter’s set of skills and expertise is reduced to a language combination, i.e. ultimately a set of data, the way this data is then mapped onto another abstraction, the language regime, which in turn reduces the goals, the participants, the specialised language, the history of previous occurrences of a meeting to a technical notion that can conveniently be treated on a large scale. Nothing particularly post-modern, here. But possibly the source of a conflict, which it would indeed be interesting to explore, between the industrial reality of organisations, on one side, and on the other the expectations of a profession which legitimately sees it foundational myths in the League of Nations pioneers and their intellectual craftsmanship.
To conclude this conversation at large with the author of chapter 2, it can be argued that roughly since the 1990s research on interpreting, especially on non-conference modes, has taken a post-modern turn, i.e. it has moved away from essentialist notions of stable meaning and equivalence – following a shift that already occurred in translation studies. Similarly, at least judging from my own experience and contrary to what has been suggested by Bahadir in this volume, institutions providing conference interpreter training are now more open to insights from other settings, i.e. those in which the interpreter is more directly exposed to issues of status, power and ideology that challenge notions of stable meaning and equivalence. But once we start looking at the prevailing lay discourse on conference interpreting, and at the self-representations by some of the practitioners as surveyed, for example, by Zwischenberger in her chapter, one can easily agree with Gile’s observation, in this volume, that the conduit model is “still widely accepted within the profession as the default standard”[2].