MULTIMODALITY IN CONFERENCE INTERPRETING: A CASE STUDY INTO ADDITIONAL WAYS OF IMPROVING OVERALL PROSPECTIVE AND PROFESSIONAL INTERPRETERS’ PERFORMANCE
ABSTRACT. Interpreting, as a complex inter-linguistic activity, relies on the use of several tools and approaches aimed at accomplishing its main task: make communication between people from different backgrounds possible. Starting from this, the essay seeks to show how conference interpreting (CI) has changed in its intrinsic nature. Ever since Daniel Gile (The Effort Models 1995), Danica Seleskovitch (La Théorie du Sens 1975) and Marianne Lederer (La Traduction Simultanée 1981) conducted their studies back in the Eighties on technical approaches, collaboration among experts and professionals stood out as a pillar and has increasingly acquired relevance. Prior knowledge (PK), collaboration (K) and multimodality (MM) appear to constitute the three main pillars that support this professional activity. Furthermore, the use of the Internet during simultaneous interpreting (SI), along with the making and exchange of language corpora, is proving to be fundamental. This in turn is having a strong impact on teaching, where learners are increasingly invited to rely on researches and tools made available. This study will submit cases involving PK, K and MM among both professionals and prospective interpreters receiving CI training and will try to sketch out how interpreting can be enhanced by instruments such as databases, videos and audio-files as well as records and transcripts of speeches containing criticalities, mistakes and/or misunderstandings tracked during the rendition phase. Finally, this contribution will add to the view that interpreting is more than the mere sum of listening and analysis (LA), memory (mostly SM) and production of target speech (PR) processes.
Key words: Prior knowledge, Collaboration, Multimodality, Language corpora, Effort Models.