Embodied cognition in the booth : Referential and pragmatic gestures in simultaneous interpreting

Abstract

From an enactivist perspective, cognition can be described as embodied, since it is determined by our bodily, multisensory, affective interaction with the environment, in particular by our social interaction. In recent years, interpreting has been defined as a multimodal, embodied cognitive activity of inter-lingual mediation, and research on gestures in conference interpreting has found that simultaneous interpreters, although not visible for their audience, do gesture in the booth. However, gestures in interpreting are yet understudied. This paper presents an exploratory, in-depth descriptive study with the aim of generating hypotheses about the cognitive functions of gestures in simultaneous interpreting. To this end, we investigate the different types of gesture that emerge throughout a whole process of simultaneous interpreting, in conjunction with the concurrent speech, the interpreter’s interaction with her environment and her own description of her production of mental images and gestures. The research question guiding our investigation is: What functions do the different types of gestures play in the interpreting process? The results suggest that, in the analyzed material, referential gestures tend to support the construction of meanings, while the main role of pragmatic gestures consists in helping to manage the progress of the interpreting process.