Cover not available
Part of
Linking up with Video: Perspectives on interpreting practice and research
Edited by Heidi Salaets and Geert Brône
[Benjamins Translation Library 149] 2020
► pp. 151–179

Chapter 6
Gesture functions and gestural style in simultaneous interpreting

In recent decades, the advent of affordable digital video-recording technology and freely downloadable specialised software for storing, viewing, editing, and annotating video and audio has contributed to a reassessment of the importance of the relation between the body, language, and communication in a variety of scientific domains, such as psychology, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, cognitive sciences and several others (Müller et al 2013, 2014). One of the consequences has also been the emergence of a new interdiscipline – Gesture Studies – entirely devoted to the investigation of the gestural modality in human interaction. However, while gesture and its relation to speech have been examined in face-to-face conversations, oral narratives, public speaking, task-based discourse, as well as other types of communicative situations, only a handful of studies to date have documented, analysed and described the range and functions of the gestures produced by conference interpreters in the booth. One of the possible reasons for this lack of attention to the body in interpreting has to do with the emphasis on decontextualised cognitive processes in the simultaneous interpreting (SI) mode, which dominated the academic field of conference interpreting research since its beginning in the 1950s until the mid-1990s (Diriker 2004: 7; Gile 1998: 70; Pöchhacker 1995: 33). In addition, the historical shift from consecutive to simultaneous interpreting in conference settings and the now more generalised use of remote interpreting resulted in a removal of the interpreter’s body from the public eye. All this, coupled with the still prevalent notion that simultaneous interpreting (SI) is an essentially verbal and monologic endeavour, as well as the difficulty in finding interpreters willing to be filmed and/or securing permission for filming, led to a dearth of multimodal data in Conference Interpreting Research. The present volume constitutes a first clear attempt at redressing this imbalance by ‘linking up with video’, while this specific chapter hopes to start filling this gap by contributing to a better understanding of the role played by gesture in SI discourse and by introducing the reader to a qualitative microanalytical approach to gestural behaviour that may be applied to the study of other modes of interpreting.

After defining gesture and its structural properties within the framework of an integrated multimodal view of language and communication and introducing some working concepts from the field of Gesture Studies, the chapter presents a video-based quasi-experimental study with four professional conference interpreters working simultaneously from English into European Portuguese (henceforth ‘Portuguese’). The study constitutes the first part of a larger research project which explores gesture production in SI by triangulating the data, methods and results from the open quasi-experiment described here, an observational field study with the same subjects, and in-depth semi-structured interviews with a larger number of interpreters. Due to space limitations, however, this chapter will only cover the first investigation. The findings offer an insight into the rich range of gestures deployed in the booth and shed some light on the multimodal nature of meaning-making in simultaneous interpreting.

Article outline
  • 1.What is gesture?
    • 1.1Dimensions of gesture use
    • 1.2The structural properties of gesture
    • 1.3Segmenting gesture
  • 2.Exploring gesture functions in SI
    • 2.1Open experiment
      • 2.1.1Interpreters, source speeches and setup
      • 2.1.2Objectives and data treatment
    • 2.2Findings
      • 2.2.1Quantitative analysis
      • 2.2.2Discussion of the quantitative results
      • 2.2.3Interpreters’ referential gestures
      • 2.2.4Why did interpreters gesture more in the second speech?
      • 2.2.5Qualitative analysis
      • 2.2.6Pragmatic gestures
        • 2.2.6.1Example of gestures accompanying a repair
        • 2.2.6.2Gestures with a cohesive function
      • 2.2.7Descriptive gestures
      • 2.2.8Gestural mimicry
  • 3.Conclusion: Gestural style in simultaneous interpreting
  • Acknowledgment
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 13 January 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.149.07gal
References
Adam, Carolin and Ginette Castro
2013 “Schlaggesten beim Simultandolmetschen – Auftreten und Funktionen.” Lebende Sprachen 58 (1): 71–82. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Alonso Bacigalupe, Luis
2009 El Procesamiento de la información durante la inerpretación simultánea: un modelo en tres niveles. Granada: Editorial Atrio.Google Scholar
Bavelas, Janet B., Nicole Chovil, Linda Coates, and Lori Roe
1995 “Gestures specialized for dialogue.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin(21) 4: 394–405. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bavelas, Janet B.
2007 “Face-to-face dialogue as a micro-social context. The example of motor mimicry.” In Gesture and the dynamic dimension of language. Essays in honor of David McNeill, ed. by Susan D. Duncan, Justin Casselland, and Elena T. Levy, 127–146. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bavelas, Janet B., Jennifer Gerwing, Chantelle Sutton, and Danielle Prevost
2008 “Gesturing on the telephone: Independent effects of dialogue and visibility.” Journal of Memory and Language 58: 495–520. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beattie, Geoff and Heather Shovelton
1999 “Do iconic hand gestures really contribute anything to the semantic information conveyed by speech? An experimental investigation.” Semiotica 123: 1–30. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boersma, Paul and David Weenink
1996 PRAAT – a system for doing phonetics by computer, version 3.4 Institute of Phonetic Sciences of the University of Amsterdam, Report 132 [URL] (accessed 30 March 2017).Google Scholar
Bressem, Jana, and Silva H. Ladewig
2011 “Rethinking gesture phases: Articulatory features of gestural movement?” Semiotica 184 (1/4), 53–91.Google Scholar
2013 “New insights into the medium hand: discovering recurrent structures in gestures.” Semiotica 197, 203–231.Google Scholar
Bressem, Jana
2013 “A linguistic perspective on the notation of form features in gestures.” In Body – Language – Communication: An International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction, ed. by Cornelia Müller, Alan Cienki et al.,1079–1098. Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter: Mouton.Google Scholar
Bressem, Jana, Silva H. Ladewig, and Cornelia Müller
2013 “Linguistic annotation system for gestures (LASG)” In Body – Language – Communication: An International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction, ed. by Cornelia Müller, Alan Cienki et al., 1098–1125. Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Calbris, Geneviève
2011 Elements of Meaning in Gesture. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cassell, Justine, David Mcneill, and Karl-Erik McCullough
1998 “Speech-Gesture Mismatches: Evidence for One Underlying Representation of Linguistic and Nonlinguistic Information.”Pragmatics &Cognition 6 (2).Google Scholar
Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth and Dagmar Barth-Weingarten
2011 “A system for transcribing talk-in-interaction: GAT 2. English translation and adaptation of Selting.” Online-Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion 12: 1–51.Google Scholar
Diriker, Ebru
2004 De-/Re-Contextualizing Conference Interpreting: Interpreters in the Ivory Tower? Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Duncan, Susan
n.d. Coding ManualUnder Perpetual Revision. [URL] (accessed 28 March 2017).
2013 “Transcribing gesture with speech.” In Body – Language – Communication: An International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction ed. by Cornelia Müller, Alan Cienki et al. ,1007–1014. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Efron, David
1941 Gesture and Environment. Morningside Heights, New York: King’s Crown Press.Google Scholar
Galhano-Rodrigues, Isabel
2007 “Body in interpretation: Nonverbal communication of speaker and interpreter and its relation to words and prosody.” In Translationsqualität. Leipziger Studien zur angewandten Linguistik und Translatologie, ed. by Peter Schmitt, and Heike Jüngst , 739–753. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Gullberg, Marianne
1998 Gesture as a Communication Strategy in Second Language Discourse. Lund: Lund University Press.Google Scholar
Holler, Judith and Geoffrey Beattie
2002 “A micro-analytic investigation of how iconic gesture and speech represent core semantic features in talk.” Semiotica 142: 31–69.Google Scholar
Kendon, Adam
1980 “Gesticulation and speech: two aspects of the process of utterance.” In The Relation of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication, ed. by Mary R. Key, 207–227. The Hague: MoutonGoogle Scholar
1988 “How gestures can become like words.” In Cross-Cultural Perspectives in Nonverbal Communication, ed. by Fernando Poyatos, 131–141. New York: C.J. Hogrefe.Google Scholar
1994 “Do gestures communicate? A review.”Research on Language and Social Interaction 27 (3): 175–200. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1995 “Gestures as illocutionary and discourse structure markers in southern Italian conversation.” Journal of Pragmatics 23: 247–279. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2004 Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2007 “Some Topics in Gesture Studies.” In Fundamentals of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication and the Biometric Issue, ed. by Anna Esposito et al., 3–19. Amsterdam: IOS Press.Google Scholar
2013 “How the body relates to language and communication: Outlining the subject matter.” In Body – Language – Communication: An International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction, ed. by Cornelia Müller, Alan Cienki et al., 7–28. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Kimbara, Irene
2006 “On gestural mimicry.” Gesture 6: 39–61. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kita, Sotaro, Ingeborg van Gijn, and Harry van der Hulst
1998.“Movement phases in signs and co-speech gestures and their transcription by human encoders.” In Gesture and Sign Language in Human-Computer Interaction, ed. by Ipke Wachsmuth, and Martin Fröhlich, 23–35. Berlin: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ladewig, Silva H. and Jana Bressem
2013 “A linguistic perspective on the notation of gesture phases.” In Body – Language – Communication: An International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction, ed. by Cornelia Müller, Alan Cienki et al., 1060–1079. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
McClave, Evelyn
2000 “Linguistic functions of head movements in the context of speech.”Journal of Pragmatics 32: 855–878. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McNeill, David
1992 Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
(ed.) 2000 Language and Gesture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015 “Speech-gesture mimicry in performance: an actor → audience, author → actor, audience → actor triangle.” Journal for Cultural Research(19) 1: 15–29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Morris, Desmond et al.
1979 Gestures: their Origins and Distribution. London: Jonathan Cape.Google Scholar
Müller, Cornelia
(2004) “The Palm-Up-Open-Hand: A Case of a Gesture Family?” in Cornelia Müller and Roland Posner (eds), The Semantics and Pragmatics of Everyday Gestures: The Berlin Conference, Berlin: Weidler, 233–56.Google Scholar
2010 “Gesture and Language.” In The Routledge Linguistics Encyclopedia, ed. by Kirsten Malmkjaer, 214–217. Abington, New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Müller, Cornelia, Alan Cienki et al.
(eds.) 2013 Body – Language – Communication: An International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction. Volume 1. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Müller, Cornelia, Alan Cienki et al.
(eds.) 2014 Body – Language – Communication: An International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction. Volume 2. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Pöchhacker, Franz
1995 “Simultaneous Interpreting: A Functionalist Perspective.” Hermes, Journal of Linguistics (14): 31–53.Google Scholar
Poyatos, Fernando
1997 “The reality of multichannel verbal – nonverbal communication in simultaneous and consecutive interpretation.” In Nonverbal Communication and Translation; ed. by Fernando Poyatos, 249–282. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rennert, Sylvi
2008 “Visual input in simultaneous interpreting.” Meta (53) 1: 204–207. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rohlfing, Katharina et al.
2006 “Comparison of multimodal annotation tools – Workshop Report.” Gesprächsforschung – Online-Zeitschrift zur Verbalen Interaktion 7: 99–123.Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emmanuel A., Gail Jefferson, and Harvey Sachs
1977 “The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation.” Language 53: 361–382. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Selting, Margret et al.
1998 Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem (GAT). Linguistische Berichte 173: 91–122.Google Scholar
Setton, Robin
2002 “A methodology for the analysis of interpretation corpora.” In Garzone, Giuliana, and Maurizio Viezzi (eds.) Interpreting in the 21st Century. Challenges and Opportunities. Selected Papers from the 1st Forlì Conference on Interpreting Studies. November 9-11. 29–45. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1999 A cognitive-pragmatic approach to Simultaneous Interpreting. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Seyfeddinipur, Mandana
2006 “Disfluency: interrupting speech and gesture.” MPI Series in Psycholinguistics, Vol. 39. Nijmegen: Radboud University, Nijmegen.Google Scholar
Sineiro de Saa, Marta
2003 Linguaxe corporal e interpretación simultânea: ¿Son os intérpretes un reflexo do orador? In Investigación Experimental en Interpretación de Linguas: Primeiros Passos, ed. by L. Alonso Bacigalupe, 39–59. Vigo: Universidade de Vigo.Google Scholar
Van Besien, Fred, and Chris Meuleman
2008 Style differences among simultaneous interpreters. The Translator(14)1: 135–152. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Viaggio, Sergio
1997 “Kinesics and the simultaneous interpreter. The advantages of listening with one’s eyes and speaking with one’s body.” In Nonverbal Communication and Translation, ed. by Fernando Poyatos, 283–293. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wittenburg, P. et al.
2006 “ELAN: a Professional Framework for Multimodality Research.” In Proceedings of LREC 2006, Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation.Google Scholar
Zagar Galvão, Elena
2013 “Hand gestures and speech production in the booth: do simultaneous interpreters imitate the speaker?”In Estudos de Linguística, ed. by Conceição Carapinha and Isabel Santos, 115–129. Coimbra: Coimbra University Press.Google Scholar
2015 Gesture in Simultaneous Interpreting from English into European Portuguese: An Exploratory Study,Unpublished Doctoral Dissertaion, University of Porto, Portugal.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Chwalczuk, Monika
2022. Construction of Shared Semantic Spaces through Gestures in Interpreter-Mediated Psychotherapy Sessions. VISUAL REVIEW. International Visual Culture Review / Revista Internacional de Cultura Visual 9:2 ► pp. 207 ff. DOI logo
胡, 敏霞
2021. Investigating the Cognitive Effects of the Interpreter’s Gestures in Multi-Modal Processing. Modern Linguistics 09:04 ► pp. 912 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 23 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.