The Teacher As Setter of Professional Norms

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THE TEACHER AS SETTER OF PROFESSIONAL NORMS. SOME THOUGHTS ON QUALITY AND QUALITY ASSESSMENT IN SIMULTANEOUS INTERPRETATION[1]

by Sergio Viaggio, United Nations Office at Vienna

Birds need a genetic mutation to improve their effectiveness at flying or nest-building. We, interpreters, are more modest: all we collectively require to improve our mediating ability is a deeper insight into our discipline, i.e. a better theory adroitly applied - a better theory that will allow us better to see and assess quality and, therefore, more efficiently to strive for it ourselves or help others achieve it.

The chasm between professional and expectancy norms

As teachers, our role is to transform natural talent into professional ability, i.e. into quality professional practice; as evaluators and examinators it is to assess our students' performance against our own quality standards: we decide what counts as quality. We are thus contributing to setting professional norms - the norms against which we, professional interpreters, judge our own, our colleagues' and our students' performance. More often than not these professional norms are at loggerheads with expectancy norms - the norms against which the layman assesses us[2]. The difference between translation/interpretation and better established professions is that in the latter case expectancy norms have become based on professional norms, so that, for instance, no patient will question the surgeon's "right" to amputate, provided it is the best alternative under the circumstances - best for the task at hand, i.e. doing what is best for the patient. The reason for this chasm is socio-historical: physicians, architects, engineers and other professionals have scientifically, practically and therefore socially established themselves as experts in their field; and in so doing they have earned the trust of users of their services, who, at worst, are willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. This they have managed through centuries of actually striving to grasp more and more thoroughly the laws objectively governing relevant phenomena, and ever more effectively putting them to practical use. As a consequence, their scientific competence (i.e. theoretical, declarative knowledge) informs their professional performance (i.e. their practical, procedural knowledge) thereby ensuring its validity. The most obvious social consequence of this is that their diplomas are recognised and protected, and that, through their professional organisations, they have the right to regulate both access to the profession and professional practice.

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Interpreters have not yet collectively succeeded in theorising their praxis, and have yet to establish themselves and the profession to a similar extent, which makes them feel much more at the mercy of their users than other professionals. This is an objective vulnerability: Although they do normally have the linguistic and thematic competence necessary for effecting most meaning (i.e. basically semantic) transfers adequately, practitioners generally lack the declarative competence to ensure the communicative validity of their performance. It is here, at the metalinguistic, communicative level --the mediator's highest instance-- that the interpreter's "right" to improve or otherwise "tamper with" the original is posed. Yet, we unhappy few know that making the linguistic, terminological, stylistic, rhetorical, cultural and other adjustments in the second speech act[3] that completes the communication circuit between the speaker and the interpreter's audience is neither a "right" nor a "duty" but an unavoidable necessity, since the relevant identity between sense as intended by the sender and sense as comprehended by the addressee is impossible without at least some degree of adaptation at all levels. The question, then, is not whether but to what extent and in what circumstances the interpreter can legitimately improve or fail to improve, adapt or fail to adapt his verbalisation of sense, i.e. without overstepping the deontological boundaries of loyalty (Nord 1991, Viezzi 1996). The answer cannot but be based on the best knowledge available about the social and physical rules objectively governing communication. Thus, the kind of declarative knowledge necessary to understand what kinds of adaptations in the second speech act are necessary, and of procedural knowledge to come up with the best possible communicative product under the circumstances, goes far beyond the purely linguistic and thematic competence that all too many practitioners assume to be sufficient. Without such declarative buttress, even the best intuitions fail to assert themselves procedurally, whereby professional norms remain naive.

The main difference between scientific and naive professional norms revolves, then, around the interpreter's role, responsibility, freedom and loyalty as an interlingual intercultural mediator. As such, he is there to help communication actively, not to stand by indifferently or, worse, in the way: His deontological responsibility towards both (sets of) interlocutors and whomever has hired him goes far beyond aptly decoding semantic representations from one language and faithfully encoding them in another. Effective mediation requires awareness of several phenomena crucial to human communication. Practitioners cannot help communication effectively it they fail to see or fully take into account that sense does not depend on the speaker alone; that it is equally constructed by the addressee through a process of inference based on the principle of relevance (Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995)[4]; that a text is but an extended semantic explicature, which can only become an effective message once the addressee has been able, in the specific social situation, to infer the relevant implicatures and to derive the relevant cognitive and affective contextual effects - which are not linguistic and have nothing to do with semantics. From the communicative standpoint, the interpreter's communicative loyalty, therefore, is both to the sender and to the addressee, although in different circumstances it may shift more towards either; in fact, "faithfulness to the original" is but the most obvious form, not of equal, but of indifferent loyalty to both interlocutors. It can be asserted that the mediator is not responsible for the sender's intended sense, or for the original utterance's semantic or stylistic adequateness to it (i.e. for the sender's ability or willingness to make himself understood); nor for the addressee's willingness or ability to understand - but this is not always the case. Indeed, in certain situations a good mediator is normally able to help both protagonists, so that the sender can tailor his verbalisation more and more accurately to the interlocutor's linguistic and cultural competence, and the interlocutor can hone his sensitivity to the sender's. This a good practitioner can achieve in two complementary ways: By making both interlocutors (or, at least, the more sophisticated one) aware of any mismatches in culture, knowledge or expectations as well as of the possible remedies, and/or by himself effecting the necessary adaptations in his own rendering. What prevents many practitioners from understanding that, unless there are political, legal or other valid reasons not to, he must do his best to help both interlocutors actively is, thus, a misconception of interpretation as a sheer exercise in interlingual transfer, whereby loyalty to the interlocutors is mistakenly equated with faithfulness to the original's form, whether at the semantic, syntactic or lexical levels.

In earlier times (and in some quarters, unfortunately, to this day) the interpreter, unaware of the true nature of his role, unsure of his own linguistic and social competence, saw the speaker or the client as his despot; nowadays, a professionally competent mediator should fear nothing aside from being unable to do a linguistically and culturally competent job - or incapable of explaining and defending scientifically any contested choice. In some instances, to be sure, the mediator must be unconditionally loyal to one of the participants, and this loyalty may well entail maximum faithfulness to formal features, including semantic form. But even in such cases, his professional expertise should not be questioned or superseded. In the end, it is a matter of bringing expectancy norms up to professional norms rather than have the latter subserviently accommodate the former[5]. This is a long, uphill battle of self-assertion, for professional, social and personal dignity - and, by short extension, for proper remuneration.

The García Landa-based model of interlingual intercultural mediation

Before proceeding any further, I shall briefly describe my development of García Landa's model: The speaker proceeds to engage in an act of speech out of a conscious motivation, itself a product of the deeper realm of the unconscious, i.e. he has a conscious and/or unconscious skopos. Such motivation can be explained summarily as a wish to modify or consolidate a state of affairs in the world and one's own or somebody else's position in it. The motivation may be more or less directly connected to the actual form and content of the utterance: there may be little or no connection between the deep motivation and the surface utterance (see Viaggio 1998). As he begins to utter, the speaker has a main and a constellation of secondary pragmatic intentions, i.e. the actual effect that he intends his act to have there and then[6]. What he specifically wishes to convey through a speech act is a speech-informed perception - an amalgam of cognitive and affective content and both linguistic and nonlinguistic speech signs that he must now reduce to sensorial stimuli that can reach his interlocutor. This perception is a function of a cognitive background that determines the relationship between meaning meant and meaning linguistically encoded - or, much more simply, between sense and meaning. In actual fact, the stimuli produced and received are nothing but acoustic and optic wavelength differences. What counts for our purposes, however, is that the speaker manage to reduce his speech-informed perception to a perceivable semiotic chain and that the interlocutor manage in turn to derive from it another speech-informed perception. The main, often decisive semiotic element, of course, is linguistic: The speaker produces a chain of linguistic signs that is basically characterised at four levels - phono-morpho-syntactic, semantic, prosodic and register. These signs he chooses more or less consciously from and according to established systems that gravitate upon them in his mind. Such systems are normally all immediately recognisable as conventional, belonging to a given language or lect, but it need not be the case: Out of ignorance or intentionally, the speaker may Amix@ systems or apply them imperfectly - as is the case, for instance, with small children, foreigners and impersonators. But there are two additional sources of sensorial semiotic stimuli: The first one is also acoustic - except that it is paralinguistic (elocutional) rather than linguistic; the other is visual - that of the speaker=s kinesics (body language and facial expressions). Both these stimuli are consciously or unconsciously used to convey mostly pragmatic information: anger, irritation, conviction or excitement need not be spelled out semantically. Regardless of the speaker=s intention, the interlocutor=s comprehension will depend heavily on these nonlinguistic stimuli. All three: language, paralanguage and kinesics or their graphic counterparts (see Viaggio 1997), are part and parcel of speech as a Gestalt, and that is why, following García Landa, I speak of speech-informed perceptions rather than linguistic perceptions (they exist too, and are a component of the higher-order speech perceptions - the way "texts" are a feature of higher-order acts of speech). The speech act takes place in a specific social situation, at a specific historic time and, within it, at a specific moment. The situation is the mise en scene of communication, upon which gravitate, on the one hand, the relevant world: the bar, the class, the lecture, the "hypertext" (Pöchhacker 1994), that activate specific frames, scripts and scenarios, and, on the other, the whole weight of the life-experience of all or each of the participants, i.e. culture in its widest possible sense.

At the other end of this act is the interlocutor who receives those stimuli and converts them into a speech-informed perception. This he does through the powerful filters of his conscious and/or unconscious willingness or resistance to understand - his own conscious and/or unconscious skopos. Once past this psychological custom's house, in order to turn the stimuli into his own speech-informed perception, the interlocutor resorts to his knowledge of the different linguistic and nonlinguistic signs and systems used by the speaker, and his own relevant cognitive baggage.

Thus we have a consciously and unconsciously motivated speech-informed perception leading to another consciously and unconsciously filtered perception. If there is no such perception at the other end, communication has not been established; in order to succeed, however, establishing communication is not enough. I submit that communication has succeeded if and when the interlocutors have achieved the relevant identity of their respective perceptions - n.b.: not similarity or equivalence, but identity; not logic or mathematical identity either, but perceptual identity: In order to have succeeded in communicating with each other, both the speaker and his interlocutor must perceive the same Athing@ in its relevant aspects. We speak of perceptual identity to refer to the relationship established between a perception and its object[7]. In the end, this identity is a function of how much of that relevant linguistic, cognitive baggage is shared by the protagonists of the act of speech and how willing they are to understand each other (what Toolan 1996 calls mutual orientedness).

Quality in simultaneous interlingual intercultural mediation

Strictly speaking, then, in order for communication to be successful all that is required is that a) the perception that the speaker intends to transmit through his act of speech and b) the perception that the interlocutor derives as a result of analysing and synthesising the sensorial stimuli be relevantly identical (i.e. identical in all relevant aspects). But success at communicating and communicative efficiency and quality are different concepts: Good communication is optimally efficient communication - one that achieves the best immediate results with minimum effort. Since communication is established between different subjects who may or may not be equally able and/or willing to make themselves understood or to understand, and who may have more or less diverging skopoi, efficiency and quality are relative to each of the participants in a specific situation. This is an essential fact: both speaking and listening are purposeful activities every bit as much as interpretation; they too are to be seen from the perspective of action theory. As García Landa rightly observes, translating is but a special way of speaking (i.e. of talking and listening) - a special way of reproducing an apprehended perceptual space through the production of a new formal space (1984:64-66). This fact has hitherto eluded most models of translation: speaking, interpreting and listening are governed by the same principles of speech production and reception, communication and action. Their success and degree of quality, therefore, must be basically measurable on the same terms. Whether mediated or not, interlingual or monolingual, then, good communication starts by being successful communication - there cannot be any more basic criterion; but the fact that an act of interpretation has succeeded is not enough for us to say that the interpreter has provided a good interpretation. First, we must recall that the responsibility for communicative success may fall unevenly on either participant: a doctor, mother, teacher, adult are respectively more responsible for understanding a patient, child, student or infant than the latter are for communicating expertly. From this perspective, a good understander is someone who will manage to understand most people (and not only Awhat they are saying@) in most circumstances regardless of the rhetoric or linguistic ability of the communicator. On the other hand, a good communicator is someone who will succeed at communicating with most people under most circumstances - someone who has a special ability to get the message across, whatever the ability or predisposition of his interlocutors. Vermeer points out that a good translator, strives at optimal "text-design" according to the intended skopos and recipients: it is not enough to be just "understandable" (Vermeer 1998:58). By the same token, we can add, a good translator (and for us, a good communicator) is someone who will always perceive the speaker's communicative and other intentions no matter how inept the "text-design" is: it is not enough just "to understand".As a mediator, therefore, the interpreter must be first and foremost an expert understander of speech acts, i.e. of motives, intentions and utterances. It is precisely for this purpose that he needs passive linguistic, cultural and encyclopaedic knowledge and maturity[8]; and he must be an expert at being understood - which, besides maturity and active linguistic, cultural and encyclopaedic knowledge, requires the ability to mediate effectively. If both the speaker and the addressee are co-responsible for communication's success and efficiency, then the interpreter --as both an interlocutor to the speaker and a speaker to the addressee is "doubly co-responsible": All other things being equal, the success of communication depends more on him than on either interlocutor, since he is a specialist in mediation, i.e. at understanding other people, analysing their motives, intentions and utterances, adapting his own speech-act production, and making other people understand.