Abstract
Speech and gestures are an integral part of utterance production. In simultaneous
interpretation, however, the use of gestures is limited or, at least, not encouraged
when an utterance is produced. Thus, 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. Last year, we reported the
results of an analysis of the data on simultaneous interpretation by a trainee from
Japanese into English. This paper describes the results of an analysis of the data on
simultaneous interpretation by the same trainee from English into Japanese. 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.
