Making gestures inside and outside the booth: A comparative study

Abstract

Although studies on multimodality in interpretation are gaining momentum, no research has been carried out comparing the multimodal behaviour of simultaneous interpreters inside and outside the booth to date. This exploratory study aims to compare the co-speech gestures and adaptors made by five professional conference interpreters while interpreting simultaneously and in face-to-face communication. The starting hypotheses are that participants will make more and larger gestures during the interview, and more adaptors during interpreting. Participants were filmed in both situations, and sections of similar duration of the videos were analysed and annotated with ELAN to obtain the gesture rate (number of gestures per minute), gesture amplitude, and adaptor rate (number of adaptors per minute) for each participant in each situation. The results obtained invalidate the first hypothesis (the gesture rate was higher in the booth in all cases), confirm the second hypothesis (the gestures were broader during the interview), and are inconclusive with respect to the third hypothesis. The analysis of the adaptors presented special methodological challenges that need to be further explored. The finding of a higher gesture rate during interpreting than during the interview might question the categorization of simultaneous interpretation as a monologic activity