Foreword in Principles of Interpreting

2013, entry from Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics

HERMES - Journal of Language and Communication in Business, 2017

Attitudinal changes are a salient recent development in the interpreting research community. They include an aspiration to science and to interdisciplinarity. However, such an aspiration is difficult to implement because of training- and motivation-related constraints, as well as difficulties in access to field data. The most promising avenues for development lie in research promotion policies in interpretation schools, and in the involvement of non-interpreting researchers in interpretation research.

2016

Much of what we grasp, understand, and act upon is a result of some interpretive activity directed on some object of interpretation. We interpret vagaries of nature, traffic signals, musical scores and performances, visual arts, speeches and writings, smiles and tears, gestures and attitudes, practices and symbols, aches and twinges, and so forth. It is hard to expect that we can discern some general pattern in these activities. This is not to deny that there could be a general pattern. But a discovery of that common cause could well be the agenda for a final science, if at all; 'if at all' because such a science may well fall beyond the scope of human design. In the meantime, it is natural to settle for some version of what may be called 'pluralism', the idea that human interpretive practices differ as interpreters and objects of those practices differ, period. I will argue that the notion of interpretation varies so much even across cultural entities such as litera...

Continuum, 2001

2017

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The BTL aims to stimulate research and training in translation and interpreting studies. The Library provides a forum for a variety of approaches (which may sometimes be conflicting) in a socio-cultural, historical, theoretical, applied and pedagogical context. The Library includes scholarly works, reference books, postgraduate text books and readers in the English language.

In this article we take an Optimality Theoretic approach to interpretation which integrates various factors into a set of typically conflicting constraints of varying strengths. The hypothesis that optimization is a leading principle in natural language interpretation strengthens the connection between linguistic theory and other cognitive disciplines. We will provide further support for this view from experimental research on computational and human sentence processing as well as on the acquisition of interpretation. We claim that our approach opens new perspectives for the study of natural language interpretation for several reasons. It has a clear view of the general relation between universal and language-specific properties (the constraints are universal, but the ranking of the constraints is language-specific). It is not modular, which allows us to locate variation in meaning not only in the semantic component proper, but in the syntax-semantics interface and the semantics-pragmatics interface. It can explain cross-linguistic variation in meaning by investigating how languages vary with respect to their weighting (ranking) of the constraints. Finally, the development of a bidirectional Optimality Theory allows us to separate the question of how to (best) formulate what you want to say, from the question of how to (best) interpret something that has been said, and this also provides us with a straightforward explanation of some facts concerning children's interpretations of natural language.

Aristotle begins On Interpretation with an analysis of the existence of linguistic entities as both physical and meaningful. Two things have been lacking for a full appreciation of this analysis: a more literal translation of the passage and an ample understanding of the distinction between symbols and signs. In this article, therefore, I first offer a translation of this opening passage (16a1-9) that allows the import of Aristotle's thinking to strike the reader. Then I articulate the distinction between symbol and sign so crucial to understanding this passage. Aristotle employs this distinction, I argue, in order to show how the linguistic entities he defines later in On Interpretation (that is, name, verb, denial, affirmation, declaration, and articulation) are both conventional and natural, owing to their being both symbols and signs, respectively. Finally, I suggest why Aristotle's analysis of how linguistic entities exist as both physical and meaningful is fitting, since man himself, "the animal that has speech," lives at the boundary between nature and intelligence.

Sign Language Studies, 2020