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de l’Europe… (‘Secondly the vision and the legacy of the founding fathers of
Europe’), which, thus far, appears syntactically parallel to the earlier
Premièrement, la vision générale de l’organisation de la grande Europe… That
is, the syntactic signal of the question form, the inversion of subject and verb, is
delayed until five seconds after the beginning of the sentence. Evidence of a
different intonation pattern is similarly delayed. Our next examination of the data
is then to ascertain how the trainee interpreters coped with this unexpected/
counter-expected texture. Is there evidence of the use of parallelism by the
interpreter to expect a listing without a finite clause? Included in this must be the
evidence of output intonation patterns, which are often subject to modification
and repair as output proceeds.
It is striking that no fewer than 14 of the group reproduced the question as a
statement that the vision and legacy were indeed still valid. From a contextual point
of view, it would probably be apparent to readers of this sequence as a written
text (that is, with more processing time and capacity available) that, if the vision
and legacy remain valid, then this is less likely to be a ‘problem’ than if they do
not remain valid. But the simultaneous interpreter is generally denied the luxury
of such contextual inferencing and runs the risk of being misled by a close
adherence to textural patterns of the source text. Most of the group (17),
nevertheless, were able to respond to the signal of the interrogative. Of these,
five seem to have been influenced by the parallelism expected following the NP-
rubric format of ‘problem one’, in that they reproduce ‘problem two’ as an NP
rubric and then signal the interrogative in a second sentence, either lexically:
Secondly the vision and the legacy of the founding fathers of Europe# We
must ask ourselves whether these principles still hold true to-day~
or by inversion:
Secondly the vision and the legacy of the founding fathers of Europe# Will
it remain valid during such a debate?#
The remaining 12 output sequences are a close calque of the texture of the input
text. Thus, at one and the same time, they reproduce an NP-rubric format but
without sentence-end intonation and continue with an inversion of verb and
subject pronoun uncharacteristic of the target language, e.g:
Second~ the vision and the legacy of the fathers of Europe~ is it…is it
valid (…)
Second~ the vision and the heritage…or the legacy rather of the
founding fathers of Europe~ will it still be valid when a new debate is
taken up~
TEXTURE IN SIMULTANEOUS INTERPRETING 57
Beyond the calque, inappropriate as it is in English, what is perceptible is the
general reluctance of the interpreters to curtail their options by closing their
sentence. There is a striking tendency to hedge one’s bets as long as possible, in
order to be in a position to handle whatever syntactic pattern is to follow.
Further textural pitfalls await the interpreter of the speech sequence in
sample 4.1
. Mention of the third item in the list is followed by what in English
linguistics is known as a wh-question, again delayed well beyond the beginning
of the utterance by a subordinate conditional clause:
Troisièmement, s’il s’avérait inevitable de prendre acte des positions
opposées des Etats européens quant à la finalité de la construction
européenne, quel cadre conviendrait-il d’adopter…
[Thirdly, if it proved inevitable to acknowledge the opposing positions of
the European states concerning the end-result of European integration,
what framework should be adopted…?]
Here at least the initial conditional si (‘if’) signals that the utterance will not be
complete until a full sentence format is achieved. A phrase-by-phrase calque of
the source text format will, in this instance, serve the interpreter well and,
indeed, 14 of our group of 32 follow this procedure. What is surprising,
however, is that no fewer than 13 of the group miss the si cue and turn this clause
(‘if it were inevitable’) either into a statement (‘it is inevitable’) or a question (‘is
it inevitable?’). Why should this happen in so many cases? A clue to what may
have happened during processing is to be found in the following version:
Thirdly~ whether it would be necessary to take opposing views …if this
were necessary with regard to the final object of European construction#
What framework would we need to adopt (…)
If an expectation is set up in which each ordinal number is immediately followed
by a rubric which states a ‘problem’, then the input sequence si…may easily be
wrongly processed as representing ‘problem no. 3’, that is ‘the problem is
whether it is inevitable…’. The intonation pattern of the version quoted above
suggests that the source text has been processed in this manner. Given the
already noted tendency to turn rubrics into verbal clauses, ‘problem no. 3’ may
alternatively be reformulated as ‘Thirdly it is inevitable…’, a pattern followed by
10 of the group. There is, then, some evidence —which is far from being
conclusive—of expectations based on previous textural patterns being used to
process incoming text.
The next item in the enumeration of problèmes, which is immediately
signalled as the closing item (Et enfin, quatrième problème…‘And finally, fourth
problem’) adopts a syntactic format not hitherto encountered in the list, a
statement of the format X=Y, incorporating a finite verb form:
58 THE TRANSLATOR AS COMMUNICATOR
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