(Salle F104)

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  Furuyama, Nobuhiro (National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo)
  Nobe, Shuichi (Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo)
  Someya, Yasumasa (Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo)
  Hayashi, Koji (The University of Tokyo, Tokyo)

A Study on Simultaneous Interpreter Gesture

Theorists in the gesture-research fi eld have agreed that gesture is an integral part of utterance production, but there are fi elds where gestures should not be used when utterance is produced. One of them is simultaneous interpretation. In a typical formal training, trainees are encouraged not to use gestures when simultaneously interpreting into the target language. Despite this anti-gestural policy, however, some simultaneous interpreters and trainees do produce gestures in their simultaneous interpretation. Many speech-gesture researchers have so far investigated only one stream of speech mostly produced by the gesturer herself, and addressed questions about how her gestures are related to her accompanied speech. Simultaneous interpretation is a cognitively demanding and highly skilled work : Interpreters listen to the presentation in one language and simultaneously interpret into their target language. They comprehend one stream of speech and produce their stream of speech such that the fl ow and the content of the latter be well organized to refl ect that of the former. When and what kind of gestures do simultaneous interpreters produce ? Do gestures help them interpret ? If so, in what way they are helpful ? Are these gestures employed to overcome problems in simultaneous interpretation ? With these in mind, we began building a corpus of videotaped data of simultaneous interpreters. We are planning to discuss these issues at the conference, with some examples of preliminary data analyses. The present study would be both benefi cial for simultaneous interpretation studies and speechgesture research.