Metaphoric gestures in simultaneous interpreting

Abstract

The paper deals with the degree to which interpreters incorporate visible behaviors from the people they are interpreting into their own practice. Since metaphoric gestures objectify abstract concepts in visible form, it is worth exploring the degree to which interpreters replicate such gestures of those whose speech they are interpreting; this can indicate how much they are employing the original speakers’ mental imagery connected with those abstract concepts. This imagery for the source domain of the metaphor ranges from highly iconic (high metaphoric) to low in iconicity (low metaphoric). The hypothesis is that interpreters use low metaphoric gestures rather than high metaphoric ones, due to the discourse type (interpreted speech). We performed formal visual and semantic analyses of ten-minute videos of interpreting a scientific lecture for the general public on a psychological topic from English into Russian. First, we analyzed the functions of the gestures in the source videos to identify metaphorically used gestures (e.g., depicting abstract ideas); then we studied the functions of the interpreters’ gestures. The results indicate a predominance of low-level, schematic metaphoricity in the interpreters’ gestures (e.g., simple ontological metaphors, as if presenting ideas on the open hand). Such results might be explained by the time pressure which leads to a decrease in mental imagery of the interpreters. We see a difference between the known role of gestures when speakers are formulating their own ideas (in thinking for speaking) and their role in simultaneous interpreting (when speakers are rendering others’ ideas, rather than forming their own ones).