English-Latvian Simultaneous Interpretation: Target Text Production Related Problems

Problems are our enemies’ - said Fullan (1993), they are enemies also of any translator or interpreter. The best way to defeat your enemies is to know them; if you know what a problem is, what causes it you will learn how to solve it, and then it will not be a problem anymore, it will become your friend. The desire to make problems of simultaneous interpretation my friends, to explore what they are, how and why they arise and how we can treat them is the reason why the author have chosen this topic for her graduation paper.

The author considers that, although simultaneous interpretation has became widespread lately in the world, it has not been researched widely, because it is a relatively new branch of translation studies- it has appeared only in the 20th century. Gile (1995) says, ‘One of the most striking and challenging phenomena in interpreting is its fundamental difficulty for the interpreter’. (p.159). The psychological stress and physiological discomfort of simultaneous interpreter is being compared to that of a test pilot’s. (Miriam 2001, p. 255). There are different aspects involved in simultaneous interpretation apart from the two languages, those are the speech rate and pronunciation of the speaker, availability of speech in written form, the environment of an event, visibility of the speaker, external noises etc. The author can add that, as a result of its mentioned earlier peculiarities, simultaneous interpretation poses fundamental difficulty also for researchers of it.

As people are finding simultaneous interpretation more and more useful, the need to know more about it grows. There are numerous books and interpreting journals dealing with research of interpreting published abroad. But as far as the author is concerned, there is little or no such works published in Latvia and dealing with problems of English- Latvian simultaneous interpretation, therefore the author intended to review in this paper the problems of English- Latvian interpreting, the translatological problems that are typical particularly for English-Latvian language combination.

In this paper the author will give a general explanation of what is simultaneous interpretation: how it appeared and developed, what is its aim and how different scholars view the process of it.

In separate chapters problems of English-Latvian simultaneous interpretation will be discussed. One chapter is devoted to theoretical description of production problems: morphological, syntactic, phonological, lexical, stylistic and environmental problems. And in the last chapter of this paper production problems are analysed in interpretations of 10 third-year students of Ventspils University College.

This paper will not provide any solutions to the discussed problems, but will try to state basing on theory and practice what are the problems of English-Latvian simultaneous interpretation and why do they appear.…