抄録
Theorists in speech-gesture study agree that speech and gestures are an integral part of
utterance production. There are, however, fields where the use of gestures is limited or, at
least, not encouraged when an utterance is produced. One of them is simultaneous
interpretation. In a typical formal training setting, trainees are encouraged not to depend on
gestures when engaged in simultaneous interpretation. Despite this anti-gestural policy,
anecdotal evidence shows that some, if not all, simultaneous interpreters and trainees do produce
gestures during their interpretation. Given this fact, the following questions arise. When do
interpreters produce simultaneous gestures and what kind are they? Do gestures help them
interpret? If so, in what way are they helpful? Do gestures change in quality as well as in
quantity as trainees acquire the skill of simultaneous interpretation? With these questions in
mind, we began building a corpus of videotaped data of simultaneous interpretations. This paper
describes the results of a preliminary analysis of this data. This analysis suggests that studies of
interpreter speech and gestures will shed light on the process of interpretation from a new and
unique perspective and provide new indices of the skill level of simultaneous interpretation and,
hopefully, ideas for new methods of training simultaneous interpreters.
https://ror.org/04ksd4g47 