2020, Vol.10, No.1

T&I REVIEW 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.52

pISSN : 2233-9221 / eISSN : 2713-8720
https://journal.kci.go.kr/erits

The present paper seeks to underscore the importance of nonverbal cues in the interpreting processes occurring in healthcare settings and to investigate how these are addressed in a sample of guidelines for actual practice. Given the relevance of nonverbal elements in most types of oral communication and the significance of language, paralanguage, and kinesics in face-to-face mediated interactions, it is necessary for interpreters to have or gain solid knowledge on nonverbal cues so that they can be capable of identifying and handling them effectively. In this vein, both medical interpreting standards and working with interpreters’ guidelines tend to address several issues intrinsically related to nonverbal language. However, it is still difficult to find a specific and detailed section that strictly focuses on the relevance of nonverbal communication in these sorts of interactions. In order to delve into the latter assertion, this paper conducts a comparative analysis of different manuals on healthcare interpreting that encompasses several phases: studying their approach to a series of specific nonverbal cues, pinpointing their strengths and weaknesses in this regard, expanding on those aspects that need further exploration, and finally, laying out a list of suggestions that may help improve interpreters’ overall performance in healthcare settings by honing their skills for dealing with nonverbal language.

In neurocognitive and physiological studies, context-independent (CI) and contextdependent (CD) properties have long been dichotomized in terms of their detecting, searching, retrieval and attention management. CI properties are always activated by the respective words on all occasions and is unaffected by contextual relevance. CD properties are the source of semantic encoding variability. Assisted by a small-sized corpus and with neurolinguistic theory of simultaneous translation, this paper investigated how CI information is processed in English-Chinese simultaneous interpretation. With naturalistic data pattern generated from the corpus, it argues that CI information in SI serves as one of the cognitive problem triggers as higher omission rate in seasoned interpreter’s recording, indicating possible cognitive overload. It is thus assumed that because CI information does not interfere with the meaning-based interpretation of the source language utterance, if it fails to be detected, no direct or obvious contextual connection can further facilitate its decoding and encoding. Thus, CI information in SL utterance may share higher rate of omissions or other kinds of delivering failures where cognitive overload appears.

English is one of the most important languages in interpreter-mediated criminal trials in Japan involving defendants, victims or witnesses not sufficiently fluent in Japanese. However, a significant number of subjects requiring Japanese-English interpreting and translation services, come from a variety of cultural, linguistic, or educational backgrounds and do not use English as their first language, and potentially, may not be sufficiently fluent in this language. Despite the fact that this issue can have serious implications for the due process and the subjects’ rights, it has been given little attention to date. Therefore, in this paper I will explore whether using Plain English could be helpful in addressing the issue of insufficient communication between actors in the interpreter-mediated criminal process, in order to consider whether: 1) Plain English can elevate the defendant’s understanding, and 2) if and how the use of Plain English may impact on the accuracy of the legal message of the source text in Japanese.