The Time Constraint in Conference Interpreting: Simultaneous vs. Consecutive

The present paper focuses on the concept of time constraint in interpreting. The main aim of the study is to compare the two modes of interpreting, i.e. consecutive and simultaneous in terms of the temporal load imposed by the operations constituting each of them. The discussion centres on the issues of external pacing and processing capacity management, the two focal points of The Time Constraint. The paper also examines a range of strategies interpreters resort to in order to minimise the impact of time pressure in both CI and SI, such as EVS regulation, economy of expression, text-editing strategies, and notation techniques

Where have the connectors gone? : the case of Polish-English simultaneous interpreting

In the stage of the Source Language (SL) text comprehension interpreters are particularly vulnerable to conditions in which they are working. As is often the case, such factors as a dense speech, fast delivery and background noise can weaken the monitoring capacity and result in the interpreter’s failure to hear and/or comprehend some elements of the original speech including connectives used to strengthen the coherence of the text. The problem of “missing” connectives in the SL was addressed in Łyda (2006, 2008). This article revisits the question of interpreters’ strategies used for recognizing and reconstructing such missing elements and extends the study to Polish-English simultaneous interpreting

Epistemic modality markers in Poilsh-English and English-Polish consecutive interpreting : modal values and categories

This paper is concerned with the treatment of epistemic modality markers in Polish/English consecutive interpreting tasks with regard to the direction of interpreting. In particular, it focuses on the frequency of transfer of modal meanings to the outputs with regard to the value and category of the markers, looking for regularities and differences which might be attributed to the direction of transfer. Epistemic modality relays the degree of speaker’s commitment to the claim made in the proposition and evaluation of its probability. Epistemic necessity encodes the speaker’s confidence in the truth of the proposition, while epistemic possibility relays lack of confidence in the truth of the statement (Coates 1983), the former expressed by high value modality markers, close to bare, unmodalised assertions (Ex. 1), the latter by middle and low modal values, at the end of the scale close to negation of the propositional meaning (Ex. 2, Halliday 1994)

Pleonasms in Polish-English interpreting

Our decision to have this article included in the present volume follows from the fact that the problem of a linguistic expression containing redundant components, a pleonasm, had received little attention in interpreting studies before 2007. It was at that time that we decided to investigate the problem of pleonastic constructions in Polish / English simultaneous and consecutive interpreting. More specifically, we attempted to explore to what extent the effect of redundancy at the input phase affected the output in the Target Language (TL). The factors involved were many, among them, as we hope to have demonstrated, the experience of the interpreter and the interpreting mode. Our analysis has shown that interpreters in the early stages of training tend to rely on Source Language (SL) syntactic patterns and transfer pleonastic structures to the TL text. By contrast, more advanced interpreters tend to focus on the propositional meaning, which results in a lower level of text redundancy

Interpreting stance : epistemic modality markers in Polish-English consecutive interpreting

Defined as “the ways the writers project themselves into their texts to communicate their integrity, credibility, involvement, and a relationship to their subject matter and their readers” (HYLAND, 1999: 101), stance can be expressed by a variety of means, including, among others, hedges, emphatics and attitude markers. Hyland sees stance as consisting of three main components: affect, relations and evidentiality. Affect concerns the extent to which personal attitudes towards what is said, including emotions and perspective, find their way into the text; relation reflects the interaction between the sender and the receiver, their involvement and their presence in the text; while evidentiality refers to “the writer’s expressed commitment to the truth of the propositions he or she presents, their reliability, strength and precision, or the strategic manipulation of these features for interpersonal goals” (HYLAND, 1999: 101)1. This paper is concerned with the last mentioned element, by CONRAD and BIBER (1999) called epistemic stance, which appears to be the most frequently marked stance component (CONRAD and BIBER, 1999; HUNSTON, 2007: 29) and whose exponents include (and go beyond) epistemic and evidential modal markers. The focus of this small-scale study is on those exponents of stance by which speakers express their assessment of the truth of a proposition and the treatment they receive in Polish-English consecutive interpreting. The first two sections address the notion of epistemic modality and its markers in English and in Polish. Further sections present the results of an analysis of trainee interpreters’ performance in a task involving an academic text of over 800 words in a consecutive mode from Polish into English, with a focus on the treatment of epistemic modal markers present in the source language text (ST)

Гендерна екзистенція? Екзистенційна конструкція з компонентом there в англійсько-польському перекладі

This paper analyses a possible effect of the variable of gender on semantic enrichment of existential sentences translated from English to Polish. Existential-there clauses in English typically take the form there + be + indefinite NP (+place/time adverbial). Since there-constructions lack a structurally congruent counterpart in Polish, they can be rendered in Polish with several syntactic constructions ranging from the verb ‘być’ (E. to be) through ‘mieć’ (E. to have) to verbs semantically richer than ‘być’ (e.g., verbs of perception, verbs of location, etc). We ask the question of whether the gender factor is correlated with the factor of text type/genre. To this purpose, we compiled a corpus of English texts representing belles-lettres and popular science writing, male-authored, female-authored and multi-authored and translated by male and female translators. Our preliminary results show that the choice of Polish translations of English existential-there follows from the interplay of genre, narrative/descriptive modes of text, and the gender of the translator, with female translators tending to replace the simple copula ‘be’ with a full lexical verb more often than male translators in dialogic parts of belle-lettres

Possibilities of using beacons in advertising

Beacon is a device, that broadcasts its identifier via Bluetooth Low Energy signal to nearby mobile devices, like smartphones or tablets. A special application installed on user’s device serves additional functionalities, that improves general user experience. This technology allows companies to develop advanced systems, that can enhance and support advertising campaigns of products and services. In this paper there is a description of the prototype of the system supporting selling special strategy for a large retail store. This strategy, called webrooming, is based on the assumption, that user is choosing the products via special webpage, and afterwards collects the order on-site, at the store. The mobile part of the system is supporting the user in creating shopping lists, showing the nearest products during shopping trip and by path optimization based on mobile agents’ signal. The impact of distance and Wi-Fi network on operation of application was tested

Diachronic research on community interpreting : Between interpreting, linguistics and social sciences

This chapter aims to present the interdisciplinary character of (diachronic) research on commu- nity interpreting by presenting an ongoing project on the communicative situation of the migrant workers from Galicia (Spain) in Hanover (Germany) in the 1960s and 70s and their need for community interpreting. In order to be able to thoroughly describe the language mediation among this migrant group, it was imperative to provide a detailed linguistic description of the Galician community in Hanover. The theoretical foundations of the project lie therefore on two different and relatively new disci- plines: community interpreting within the field of interpreting studies and migration linguistics within the applied linguistics. The diachronic nature of the object of study posed some additional methodological challenges. Being one of the main research problems on interpreting the creation of the corpus, oral history, within social sciences, supplied the guidelines and strategies for conducting narrative interviews, which form the empirical basis of the study. As for the analysis methodology, qualitative content analysis provided a flexible though systematic model to qualitatively analyse a corpus based on linguistic material, such as semi-structured interviews

Frazy nominalne "mój mąż" i "moja żona" w amerykańskim dyskursie publicznym mówionym

The article is an attempt to answer the question concerning the relation between a private and public sphere in communication, especially in two types of discourses that could be called public, namely, in the American public radio and television discourse, and the American academic one. The research subject constitutes two nominal phrases, that is, my husband and my wife which in view of its reference, and culturally —triggered associations with a family sphere direct a listener at what is private without a doubt. The author is particularly interested in grammar and phraseology of sentences including the phrases analysed as a determiner, though, not the only one, of the privacy borderlines which are not overcome (yet) in either of discourses

Po co komu negacja? : ideologiczne aspekty negacji w wiadomościach telewizyjnych

The authors notice that negation is more frequent in spoken language than in news and spoken English (dialogue), and that the number of verbal interaction users influences the number of negation used. Utterances characterized by a high level of spontaneity include more occurrences of negation than those prepared beforehand. The authors made an attempt to define if any qualitative and functional differences within the same utterance genre, namely television news, can be found between Polish and English, and if making negations can have ideological implications. The phenomenon of negation seems to constitute a perfect tool for polarizing a positively-marked description of “us”, and a negatively-organized description of “them”. The opinions are directly conveyed with the use of a given system of the receiver opinion who in order to accept the legitimacy of statements, their relevance and coherence, has to make an effort to imagine an alternative vision of the world, projected by the news senders. In this way, negation inscribes into the mechanisms of ideology