Abstract
The most important question that arises from Chaps. 1, 2, 3 and 4 is probably: Can effort and spoken language processing be embodied in visuomotor activities of interpreters? And if yes, can it be measured or investigated? This chapter describes a psycholinguistic, mixed-factorial study involving professional interpreters and interpreting trainees who performed simultaneous and consecutive interpreting, and in whom eye movements and beat gestures were investigated to see whether, and in what ways, they were modulated when interpreters processed language.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
This prediction treats fixation count as a marker of visual attention. I assumed that increased visual attention to stimuli congruent with auditory input reflect, to a large extent, cognitive processing or internal simulation of events, similarly to what Richardson and Spivey (2000, p. 274f.) or Magnuson, Tanenhaus, Aslin, and Dahan (1999) postulated.
- 2.
This criterion was formulated based on personal contacts with conference interpreters. The idea was that professional interpreters in Poland would usually have at least an assignment per week, i.e., four assignments per month during what is generally understood as a “season” and stands for months when interpreting assignments are more frequent (i.e., April, May, June, September, October and November), and fewer (if any in some cases) assignments during other months). For this reason, the number of at least two assignments (expressed here as two 5-h working days) per month was formulated.
- 3.
Equalling five years of experience to three years of experience and a degree was driven by the fact that the majority of interpreting training programmes last two years in Poland, where the study was conducted.
- 4.
Irrespective of having a declared language C, these were bidirectional interpreters, which is understood in this study as interpreting from and into at least one working language professionally.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
Cardinal directions systems usually distinguish four, eight or sixteen cardinal directions, and the four cardinal directions (north, south, east, west) system was used in the study. The projection-based approach (Frank, 1992, 1996) to dealing with cardinal directions gave the basis for their use in the study. In accordance with the projection-based approach, the directions were defined as placed on four axes and labelled as north, south, east and west (Barkowsky, 2002).
- 8.
The choice of visuals was based on a norming study, in which 20 independent raters rated the congruence between the auditory and the visual input. The raters were presented with 10 selected visuals while listening to parts of speeches containing cardinal directions. After listening to each fragment, the role of a rater was to assess, on a 7-point Likert scale, the degree of semantic congruence between the visual and the auditory input. On the Likert scale, 1 stood for “highly incongruent” and 7 referred to “highly congruent”. The picture with the highest congruence and lowest congruence were selected as the congruent and incongruent visual stimuli and used in the study.
- 9.
The visuals were drawn with a solid line of exactly the same colour and width (0.7 mm), while differing in the degree of details and shape.
- 10.
The equipment was available at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland.
- 11.
- 12.
The aim of presenting the participants with such instructions was to make them sit in front of the screen (which is also often the case in simultaneous interpreting) and the eye tracker, so that gaze was recorded, but at the same time not to prime the participants into looking at the visuals or imagining the content (as their tendency to do so was verified in the course of the study). For this reason, the instructions did not ask the subjects to look at the slides, and there was no word “imagine” included in the instructions. What is more, the study aimed at testing natural language processing and natural behaviour, including the production of co-speech gestures.
- 13.
Importantly, the modes were not compared in this study, but investigated independently.
- 14.
The experimental design was first tested in a pilot study, involving 10 interpreting trainees.
- 15.
In the consecutive mode, the interpreter produces the whole target text (not particular items) after the speaker. This made it impossible to define IDINs from the onset of the speaker’s production of a particular item until the interpreter produced this item. For this reason, the consecutive mode was divided into listening and production in the analysis.
- 16.
There is a certain level of disagreement about what should be the cut-off point (used to minimize the effect of noise and obtain coherent eye tracking data) for mean fixation duration or fixation duration in eye tracking studies. On the lower end of the scale, Inhoff and Radach (1998) set the cut-off point as 50 ms, while Rötting (2001) operates within the range of 60–120 ms. However, on the upper end, Granka, Hembrooke, Gay, and Feusner (2008) used a threshold of 200 ms for fixation duration, while Pavlović and Jensen (2009) excluded participants with their fixations of less than 200 ms from the analysis. Finally, Sjørup (2013) used a 180 ms cut-off point. That notwithstanding, determining the adequate cut-off point in Interpreting Studies, as opposed to translation, remains an open issue.
- 17.
- 18.
In addition to the analyses presented above, descriptive and inferential statistics were calculated separately for the congruent, incongruent and blank screen condition (for both mean fixation duration and mean number of gestures per minute). This was done because, as described in this chapter, visuals were available to the participants throughout the whole text, while each of the 6 texts contained different items, including numbers, lists and narratives. For this reason, the effect of cognitive load on mean fixation duration was calculated not only irrespective of the conditions, but also separately for each condition (congruent, incongruent, blank screen). These results of these calculations corroborated all the effects described in the present section.
- 19.
I am aware that the r and Cohen’s d should not be directly compared with each other. The results of Student t test and Mann Whitney U test are presented in one table to facilitate their reading, while any comparison is based on re-calculating the r and Cohen’s d values based on the formula available at http://www.uccs.edu/lbecker/effect-size.html.
- 20.
- 21.
- 22.
As discussed in Chap. 4 and reported by Holmqvist et al. (2015), very short fixations may also account for cognitive load or stress. In such circumstances, the participants can no longer efficiently allocate their cognitive resources to particular input, which results in unnaturally short and frequent fixations. Such characteristics were found in none of the participants, although probably a more thorough analysis is needed to corroborate this statement.
- 23.
Importantly, the experimenter was sitting behind the participant.
- 24.
It should also be noted that the participants of the present study were interpreting from their L1 (i.e., Polish) into L2 (i.e., English), which in some interpreters may constitute an additional challenge, assuming that the L1-to-L2 links might be sometimes weaker than L2-to-L1 links in bilinguals, as illustrated in the Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994, p. 158). On the other hand, the study sample was composed of bidirectional interpreters, in whom the two types of links mentioned can be equally strong.
- 25.
Blank screen is also treated as a kind of visual input in this study. To give an example of “no visual input”, a study in complete darkness would not include any visual stimuli. On the contrary, in this study, the participants were always exposed to “something”, hence, any type of input is treated as visual stimuli.
- 26.
This example was not given by Kriston (2012), but was formulated based on Kriston’s (2012) description of the Link Method.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Stachowiak-Szymczak, K. (2019). The Study: Interpreting Embodied in Eye and Hand Movements. In: Eye Movements and Gestures in Simultaneous and Consecutive Interpreting. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19443-7_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19443-7_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-19442-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-19443-7
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)