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SPA Interpretar en organismos internacionales |
contents
Introduction | Languages and language combinations at international organisations | New realities, new challenges | Research potential
The term international institution is normally used to refer to formal international organizations (Haas, Keohane & Levy 1993). However, there are other studies that conceptualize this term as a set of more or less formal rules (Simmons & Martin 2012). Yet others equate it with norms, these being understood as “shared expectations, understandings, or standards of appropriate behaviour for actors with a given identity” (Duffield 2007: 6).
This entry focuses on global intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), that is, institutions created to work in good faith on issues of common interest and whose members are bound by a formal agreement (a treaty or other instrument). Examples of these are the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU). Setting the context is important because interpreting is a socially situated practice: an activity in a specific community of practice—the institution—characterized by the speeches that are interpreted, the role of the interpreter in the institution and the norms governing the organization, in general, and the interpreter’s work, in particular, as well as the culture and ideology inherent in the organization (Moore 2018). Thus the competencies expected from interpreters include not only excellent interpreting skills, but also professional integrity and extensive background knowledge of the organization they work for.
Most studies carried out in Translation Studies and IGOs deal with the work carried out by translators (see Kang 2014; Koskinen 2000; Pym 2000; Wagner, Bech & Martínez 2002). Fewer studies deal with the topic of interpreting in this context. It is worth noting the two volumes of Interpreting in international organizations. Research, training and practice (vol. I, vol. II) edited by Russo & Alonso (2017, 2018), as well as the seminal works by Baigorri (2004), who provides a historical perspective of interpreting at the UN, and Duflou (2016), who examines EU interpreters as a professional community of practice. Other relevant studies are those by Bissière-Whiting (2010) and Jacobs (2017), Ruiz & Diur (2017a, 2017b), and Okoniewska (2016), who focus on the International Labour Organization (ILO), the UN and the European Parliament, respectively. Bissière-Whiting (2010), focusing on the International Labour Conference, explores the isolation of interpreters from other people working in the Conference Secretariat, including other linguists. She argues that the interpreters would benefit from a more open and direct channel of communication within the Secretariat, given their need to obtain information on the meetings in which they work and get hold of the speeches that the delegates will read aloud. Jacobs (2017) examines the interpreters’ perception of and attitudes towards the ILO’s electronic transmission system of speeches established in 2012. For their part, Ruiz & Diur (2017a, 2017b) provide a comprehensive description of the UN competitive examinations for language positions (CELPs), whose goal is to establish a roster of successful candidates to cover present and future vacancies. They also examine why the pass rate is so low through a survey targeted at UN staff interpreters. They conclude that the main reason for the low pass rate is that the challenges and type of work encountered at the UN are not sufficiently reflected in the candidates’ previous training. Lastly, Okoniewska (2016) focuses on the relevance of cognitive contextual awareness and the identification of context models in the transmission of the message at the European Parliament.
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Languages and language combinations at international organisations
In the second half of the 20th century, the number of international organisations has increased. Most of them decided to establish what Joscelyne (2000: 82) calls a “foundational multilinguality” that reflected the configuration of forces after WWII. This multilingualism is reflected to a greater or lesser extent at different organisations. Some of them have opted for a pared-down approach. For example, the Council of Europe, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) only have English and French as official languages. Few organisations have only one official language, as is the case of the Universal Postal Union (UPU), with French. Others have implemented a complex language system—the European Union being the most extreme case, with 24 official languages. An intermediate position is that of the UN or some of its specialised agencies, such as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the World Health Organisation (WHO), the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), the UNESCO or the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), all of which have six official languages—Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. Many organisations have three official languages (English, French and Spanish), as is the case of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
Apart from the official languages, there are other languages that can be used on request, these being called the working languages. For example, at the ILO, Russian, German, Arabic and Chinese, together with Japanese active and Portuguese passive at sessions of the International Labour Conference, are the working languages; at the OECD, the working languages are German, Russian and Spanish.
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| Interpreting at the European Union. |
A very particular case of multilingualism is the EU, which holds its meetings in 24 languages (with 552 possible language combinations), these being complemented by external regional languages, such as Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Russian. As an expression of the magnitude of the interpreting services at this organisation, Seeber (2017) posits that the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Court of Justice account for 325,000 interpreting days per year, half of which are serviced by a total of 1,000 staff interpreters and the other half by freelancers. It is no surprise that this organisation is the single largest employer of conference interpreters in the world, with the highest number of languages and, therefore, interpreting booths. Given the scale involved, the “complete language regime” (i.e., into and from the 24 languages) is not always used. Instead, the use of “reduced language regimes” allows all delegates to take the floor in their languages but interpreting is only provided into a subset of these languages, which usually consists of the most widely used.
The tradition at most of the international organisations is to interpret into the A language, with some exceptions. At the UN and UN agencies, interpreters from the Arabic and the Chinese booth interpret into a B language, which is usually French or English for the former and English for the latter; the use of relay interpreting is necessary for all of the other booths. At the European institutions, interpreters in the majority of the most widely used languages work into their A language and have many passive languages at their disposal, contrary to what is expected from interpreters working at other international organisations, who have fewer passive languages. In fact, at the EU, having many passive languages is considered to be more important than having two active languages because this reduces the need to resort to relay interpreting. However, after the great waves of expansion, beginning with Finland, the European institutions started to test and recruit interpreters working into their B language (usually English, French or German) for languages such as Maltese, Estonian, Croatian, Slovak and Czech (Diriker 2015).
At first sight, conference interpreting in these settings could be argued to have remained basically unaltered. Baigorri & Travieso (2017) state that the exercise of listening to one language and speaking in another has remained unchanged, as well as the number of official languages and the main bodies where conference interpreting takes place. Also Donovan (2017) states that at the OECD many features have remained the same, such as the number of staff interpreters, the official languages, the room settings and the definition of the interpreter’s role. This could also apply to other organisations.
However, a closer look shows that changes are already in place. Donovan highlights the presence of screens to display presentations, the meeting agenda or the people participating remotely, the use of electronic devices by the delegates, the faster delivery of speeches leading to a higher density of words, and the increase in the number of countries represented, leading to an increase in the demand for interpreting in third languages. Baigorri & Travieso (2017) agree with Donovan and posit that the working environment at the UN has experienced significant modifications in terms of meeting formats, content, political significance, an increased number of participants and the use of information and communication technologies. These changes have an impact on the quality of interpreting. Baigorri & Travieso (2017) state that, when it comes to the quality of interpreting, interpreters are assessed in terms of elements such as sense or meaning consistency, logical cohesion, completeness, fluency of delivery and grammatical correctness. However, this assessment is carried out regardless of the fact that these elements may be absent from the source speech. Also, there are certain factors beyond the interpreter’s control that have a negative impact on potential interpreting failures. In the following sections, we will focus on four areas that have experienced changes in the past decade, putting a strain on interpreters’ capacities: the increasing use of new interpreting modalities, greater speed, the widespread use of English and the profusion of accents, and the ever more extensive implementation of videoconferencing and remote interpreting platforms.
Interpreting modalities
The modality most used at international organisations is conference interpreting, defined by Diriker (2015: 78) as “the rendering of speeches delivered in one language into another at formal and informal conferences and in conference-like settings”. Conference interpreting comprises consecutive and simultaneous interpreting and, to a lesser extent, whispered interpreting, or chuchotage, a modality that can be practised using the bidule, a portable device composed of a wireless microphone and headsets for listeners, which allows for simultaneous interpretation without a booth.
The introduction of simultaneous interpreting (SI) in the second half of the 20th century marked the decline of consecutive interpreting (CI), which nowadays is seldom used at international organisations. Donovan (2017) explains that at the OECD, SI represents 99% of the workload and that most interpreters will probably not have the chance to work in consecutive, as this modality is only requested very occasionally, for small informal working groups and as a fall-back solution when no booths are available. In fact, if the directorate or client committee wants CI, this has to be specified because the default mode is SI. At the UN, the usual modality has been SI since the late 1940s. Then at the European Institutions, 90% of interpreting services are provided in simultaneous (Seeber 2017).
However, whereas the predominance of SI is undeniable at international organisations, each one of them adopts a different approach to the admission exams to test the candidates’ skills. Not all organisations convene official admission exams for staff interpreters, though, as some organisations do not have staff interpreters, this being the case of some UN agencies that only recruit freelance interpreters. That said, these agencies do organise exams to test freelance candidates, although some such exams are not officially announced and are an internal procedure. Similarly, some organisations have a process in place through which they hire an interpreter for one day and the senior interpreters listen to the performance and then decide if the work has been acceptable. At other organisations, the system involves the provision of a dummy booth for several months so that the candidate can become acquainted with the work carried out at the organisation, the types of meetings and the terminology, among other elements. Once the candidate has decided that the moment has come, the staff interpreters listen to the candidate’s performance and decide if the rendition meets the quality standards. Where more informal admission exams are convened, only SI is tested. Of those who do organise official admission exams, for both freelance and staff interpreters, it is worth highlighting the European institutions and the UN. At the former, consecutive as well as simultaneous is tested in the exam, whereas at the latter, only simultaneous is tested, in both the freelance exam and the LCE. That said, at the European institutions the candidate, who must already have been considered eligible by an inter-institutional Screening Committee and complied with its language profile requirements, is invited to complete an online pre-selection test consisting of a 10–12 minute SI task. This is an indication of the importance that the European institutions place on SI.
Testing CI at the EU is probably based on the pedagogical assumption that skills transfer from CI to SI, that is, from the less to the more complex modality. However, we lack empirical evidence to substantiate the adequacy of teaching CI before SI or the transfer of skills from one modality to the other. Even if consecutive has mostly been replaced by simultaneous in the different markets, Seleskovitch’s (1968) school of thought has been adopted by most European institutions for their own training programmes (Sawyer 2004) and is at the core of the EMCI (European Masters in Conference Interpreting) curriculum. This is a consortium of universities that work in collaboration with the DG SCIC (European Commission) and the DG LINC (European Parliament), and they all insist on the need to master consecutive even though this modality will seldom be used.
A modality that is increasingly used at international organisations is SI with text, with the variant of SI of texts used in meetings, an example of this being when in a drafting committee the delegates read out loud sections of a document, including amendments that have not yet been reflected in the paper text or on the conference room screen. SI of texts demands a combination of SI and sight translation skills, with a higher speaker delivery rate being a challenge provided by both modalities. The literature assumes that a speech written to be read out loud renders the interpreter’s work even more challenging and thus influences performance, since such a text typically contains dense chunks together with complex and rhetorical structures, specific features also common to written text in general including lexical density, low-frequency vocabulary, complex syntactical structures, and a significant degree of textual coherence and cohesion. Moreover, speeches that are read require less forethought from the speaker, who often subconsciously increases the delivery rate as a result. Interestingly, interpreters perceive the delivery of a speech to be faster than it in fact is even when a text is recited at a normal speed and, significantly, understanding read discourse delivered at a high rate may even be challenging for source language listeners.
This demonstrates that SI with text requires a different approach that combines visual and oral input. However, as Seeber and Delgado posit (2020), a systematic approach to training for this modality is seldom included in interpreting school syllabi, to the extent that there are professional interpreters who have never been confronted with it before starting to work.
Speed
Speed is one of the main stressors for conference interpreters who work at international organizations. Conferences are increasingly dense and their delivery is becoming faster, and written speeches that are read out loud are more and more usual. Diur (2015) and Baigorri & Travieso (2017) state that at the UN there are now more speakers and the sessions have stricter calendars and a regulated length, so delegates’ speaking time has been progressively reduced. As they want to say as much as possible, they resort to written instead of impromptu speeches—the texts not always being distributed among the interpreters—and they increase their delivery rate. At the EU, the time allocated in full debates in the European Parliament’s Plenary is only six minutes and during short presentations the time is further reduced to four minutes (see Seeber 2017 for more information).
Barik (1973), Pio (2003), and Ruiz & Galván (2019) all conclude that the greater the speed, the more omissions are made. Ruiz & Galván (2019) posit that higher delivery rates negatively impact target speech accuracy among both novice and expert interpreters. Finally, Ruiz, Varela & Barghout (2020) conclude that even seasoned UN staff interpreters, with extensive experience of dealing with speed, are prone to omitting information when faced with demanding delivery rates. Korpal’s (2016) study of trainee interpreters shows that interpreting a speech delivered at speed is linked to higher levels of stress than when working with a more moderate rate of delivery—a higher heart rate being the proof—although it should come as no surprise that speed also impacts interpreter stress. Thus, an increase in delivery rate is shown to have an impact on the interpreter’s performance.
Barghout, Ruiz & Varela (2015) calculated the word rate per minute of speeches from the 16th Session of the UN Human Rights Council (HRC), singling out at random two speeches in English per day. They found an average speed of 149.12 wpm, with the highest speed at 201 wpm and the lowest at 122.17 wpm. Ruiz, Varela & Barghout (2016) measured and compared delivery rate in English and French, using 42 randomly selected speeches from the 24th Session of the UN Universal Periodic Review (UPR) Working Group, 21 of these coming from the review of Belgium and the other 21 from the review of Namibia. In the review of Belgium, the highest delivery rate in the English speeches was 190 wpm and the lowest was 133 wpm, the average being 160.7 wpm. The highest delivery rate in the French speeches was 193 wpm and the lowest was 128 wpm, the average being 158.9 wpm. The total average for Belgium came out at 160.71 wpm. In the review of Namibia, the highest delivery rate in the English speeches was 185 wpm and the lowest was 121 wpm, the average being 163 wpm. The highest delivery rate in the French speeches was 191 wpm and the lowest 126 wpm, the average being 160.4 wpm. The total average for Namibia came out at 161.76 wpm.
At other organizations the situation is similar. Seeber (2017) states that read speeches at the European Parliament (EP) are delivered at approximately 160 wpm, a finding in line with those of De Manuel (2014). In his study on the use of real speeches in interpreter training, De Manuel measured the actual delivery rate at the EP, and found the average delivery rate at the EP to be 150–151 wpm in both Spanish and French.
All these figures show how speed is indeed one of the major challenges for interpreters at international organizations. According to the reference values posited by Setton and Dawrant (2016), the total values arrived at by Barghout et al. (2015) and Ruiz et al. (2020) indicate that the delivery rate could be qualified as “challenging” for the HRC (140-160 wpm), and “difficult” (>160 wpm) for the UPR. De Manuel’s (2014) values could be qualified as challenging.
Since speed has come to be such a pressing issue, interpreter admission exams organized by international organizations now incorporate speeches delivered at a very high rate. The UN demands that candidates demonstrate their capacity to keep pace with high delivery rates in their admission exams, with speed probably now being the most pertinent admission criterion and one that is successfully dealt with by only very few candidates. Diur (2015) and Ruiz & Diur (2017a) emphasize how difficult the challenges faced by LCE candidates really are, as evidenced in the low success rate in all six booths, that rarely exceeds 20%. Their study reveals that speed is both the most taxing element of and the main impediment to passing the exam.
The widespread use of English and the profusion of accents
Another important challenge at international organizations is the widespread use of English as a lingua franca. The number of languages interpreted is simply lower than that of native languages spoken by delegates (Donovan 2017). This new reality is reflected by Baigorri & Travieso (2017) in their study on how UN interpreters perceive the changes in their working conditions over the last two decades and how these changes have affected their professional performance. In contrast to the EU, where there are 24 official languages and each delegate can speak his or her A language or L1 in an official capacity, at the UN there are only six official languages—English, French, Russian, Chinese, Arabic and Spanish. There are 193 UN member states, so that in an institutional context many of the delegates cannot use their mother tongue and must resort to a foreign language, usually English.
The profusion of regional and non-native accents can add to the stress experienced by candidates taking the UN LCE, in part because training institutions usually use standard native speakers throughout their courses and students are seldom confronted with other types of accent. It is worth noting that, in the Workload study commissioned by AIIC in 2001 targeting freelancers and staff interpreters, difficult accents constitute an important stressor, together with speed. Even though the results of the study are more than a decade old, the fact that accents were quoted as a factor of stress and burnout is relevant. These results are echoed in the literature on the impact of foreign non-native accents on the interpreter’s performance (e.g., Albl-Mikasa 2010) and the interpreting process as a result of the particularities of these accents at both prosodic, segmental and suprasegmental levels (see Baese-Berk & Morill 2015).
New technologies and remote interpreting
A radical change for interpreters has come from the access to online resources to prepare meetings and to consult during the meeting. Hardcopy documents are usually still distributed during drafting sessions or when the speech is read out, but interpreters increasingly work with electronic documents, so they have had to adapt to new working ways. However, interpreters still prefer working with hardcopy documents. Jacobs’ (2017) study participants—interpreters working at the ILO Governing Body in the October–November session 2015—declared that they prefer the previous transmission of hard copies, which facilitate the preparation of speeches. Even though they consider that the electronic document transmission system implemented by the ILO works well, they draw attention to the disadvantages of that system and suggest that the electronic versions should be a complement to the hard copies and a last resort when hard copies are not available.
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The meeting environment has also changed considerably and is likely to change even more, given the more flexible spatial and temporal extension of meetings, the shaping of the meeting space by access to communication and information technology, the compression of content, the existence of new meeting formats and the use of remote interpreting and participation. This latter change has been largely motivated by a desire to reduce travel costs and gain access to a more extensive pool of interpreters.
Remote interpreting (RI) has been a recurrent topic in the literature. The term usually refers to video remote interpreting (VRI), whereby interpreters work from a remote location without a direct view of the room but with a view of the speakers on a screen. This modality is widely used elsewhere, such as court and medical scenarios. Remote interpreting needs to be distinguished from remote participation, which describes a situation where one or more participants follow the meeting remotely. This mode of participation is becoming increasingly frequent at international organizations. Remote participation disconnects meeting content from spatial and temporal limits. Another modality is proximity interpreting, in which interpreters are physically displaced to a nearby room but within the organization’s premises.
RI has been used in the past: in 1976 different remote conferencing technologies were tested at the 19th Session of the General Conference of UNESCO (Mouzourakis 1996). Two years later, the United Nations followed suit and tested this modality (Mouzourakis 1996). The interpreters at the latter event found videoconferencing conditions to be inferior to those of simultaneous interpreting in a standard meeting room. They perceived videoconferencing to be adequate for interactions of a relatively “neutral” nature, including the exchange of information and, to a lesser degree, cooperative problem solving, but not for negotiation or conflict resolution, when direct, personal, and often informal contact is essential.
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) conducted a study in 1999 on interpreters’ perception of and attitudes towards RI, and its main finding was that the interpreters reported a loss of control and increased fatigue, although the physiological stress measurements did not reflect this self-reported data.
The most extensive study of RI undertaken thus far is that conducted by the EP in 2004 (Roziner & Shlesinger 2010). Overall, this study established that the interpreters were satisfied with the quality of interpreting and the medical measurements of stress were comparable to the values obtained in non-remote conditions. However, they reported increased fatigue and a feeling of alienation. As in the ITU study, there was a dissociation between objective physiological measurements, such as ocular, haematological and endocrine indicators of fatigue and stress, and self-reported data that pointed at an increase in headaches, eye irritation, difficulty in concentration, burnout, irritability and fatigue. This dissociation was also to be found between objective output quality and self-reported performance.
Nine years later, Seeber, Keller, Amos et al. (2019), using a mixed-methods approach, analysed the attitudes of interpreters who provided video remote conference interpreting during the 2014 FIFA World Cup™ to see how expectations and human factors influence conference interpreters’ attitudes towards video remote conference interpreting. They found that the interpreters’ attitudes towards RI as experienced during that event were in general positive (they would appear to be more so than in studies of previous events), and that this is probably due to the technological advances of recent years. Interestingly, for the participants the feeling of “being there” is of the utmost importance because they consider that it has an important impact on their role and work. The authors conclude that future studies should try to identify the technical and human parameters responsible for this phenomenon of “being there”, which could mitigate what Mouzourakis (2006) calls the causes of interpreter alienation under RI conditions.
Research on interpreting at international organizations should expand in the near future, together with our understanding of interpreters’ experiences and needs in specific contexts and organizations. Such research could further explore the challenges faced by interpreters as a consequence of the ongoing changes in the organizations they work for that have been summarized throughout this entry. Some issues will require a great deal of further analysis—this is particularly true of the impact of remote interpreting on interpreters’ performance and wellbeing and the role of emotions in the interpreters’ work. Further analysis is also in order to both verify whether current training programs are still adequate for training interpreters, given the evolution in the profession in the last decade, and explore the topic of employability at international organizations. Ideally, training schools should stay abreast of changes as they arise in order to inform the development of consistent training programmes adapted to market needs. Another area for further research is the implementation of distance learning programmes. The latest developments, namely the coronavirus pandemic, have shown us that unexpected circumstances can completely change the conception we have of both the profession and training. This change means that we should think more about distance training solutions and new pedagogical approaches.
Joint research among scholars, interpreter trainers and organisations that recruit interpreters is very welcome, and so is a closer collaboration of the above players with the users of interpreting services at international organisations.