Gesture functions and gestural style in simultaneous interpreting
Authors: Zagar Galvão Elena 
Published: January 2020

In recent decades, the advent of affordable digital
video-recording technology and freely downloadable specialised software for
storing, viewing, editing, and annotating video and audio has contributed to
a reassessment of the importance of the relation between the body, language,
and communication in a variety of scientific domains, such as psychology,
linguistics, anthropology, sociology, cognitive sciences and several others
(Müller et al 2013, 2014). One of the consequences has
also been the emergence of a new interdiscipline – Gesture Studies –
entirely devoted to the investigation of the gestural modality in human
interaction. However, while gesture and its relation to speech have been
examined in face-to-face conversations, oral narratives, public speaking,
task-based discourse, as well as other types of communicative situations,
only a handful of studies to date have documented, analysed and described
the range and functions of the gestures produced by conference interpreters
in the booth. One of the possible reasons for this lack of attention to the
body in interpreting has to do with the emphasis on decontextualised
cognitive processes in the simultaneous interpreting (SI) mode, which
dominated the academic field of conference interpreting research since its
beginning in the 1950s until the mid-1990s (Diriker 2004: 7; Gile 1998: 70; Pöchhacker 1995: 33). In addition, the historical shift from
consecutive to simultaneous interpreting in conference settings and the now
more generalised use of remote interpreting resulted in a removal of the
interpreter’s body from the public eye. All this, coupled with the still
prevalent notion that simultaneous interpreting (SI) is an essentially
verbal and monologic endeavour, as well as the difficulty in finding
interpreters willing to be filmed and/or securing permission for filming,
led to a dearth of multimodal data in Conference Interpreting Research. The
present volume constitutes a first clear attempt at redressing this
imbalance by ‘linking up with video’, while this specific chapter hopes to
start filling this gap by contributing to a better understanding of the role
played by gesture in SI discourse and by introducing the reader to a
qualitative microanalytical approach to gestural behaviour that may be
applied to the study of other modes of interpreting.

After defining gesture and its structural properties within the
framework of an integrated multimodal view of language and communication and
introducing some working concepts from the field of Gesture Studies, the
chapter presents a video-based quasi-experimental study with four
professional conference interpreters working simultaneously from English
into European Portuguese (henceforth ‘Portuguese’). The study constitutes
the first part of a larger research project which explores gesture
production in SI by triangulating the data, methods and results from the
open quasi-experiment described here, an observational field study with the
same subjects, and in-depth semi-structured interviews with a larger number
of interpreters. Due to space limitations, however, this chapter will only
cover the first investigation. The findings offer an insight into the rich
range of gestures deployed in the booth and shed some light on the
multimodal nature of meaning-making in simultaneous interpreting.