Chapter 14: Language, Speech and Presentation Skills

14.1. Culture of language and speech

Culture of language and speech is the most important component of adequate interpretation and its generating for it’s the most favorable comprehension.

Culture of interpreter’s language and speech is a serious and always evaluated factor of not only comprehension improving but the increase of the adequacy of interpretation into native language. Culture of interpreter’s language and speech is the ability and skill to arrange the interpreted utterance in correct, clear and beautiful way on the basis of professional knowledge of native language.

Surely language norm is flexible, and changes under the influence of extra linguistic factor (economy globalization, scientific-technical discoveries, social-political changes, etc.)

Still in any case the language norm comes forward as a definite pattern, which makes a speaker (interpreter) to watch his language all the time, especially when communicating with public.

M. Gorky indicated, that any educated person should “be able to hear…his own language”, his manner of language communication. This idea becomes especially topical and pressing in our era of broad expansion of interpretation in both professional activity and everyday life.

14.2. Culture of language and general culture

Unity of clear understanding of translation object (sender of information), sequence of ideas and forms of their expression in oral translation puts in the forefront the problem of culture of language and, no matter how strange it sounds, the problem of native language.

Certainly, during such a difficult and responsible process, as oral translation, linguistic errors, inaccuracies, reservations, erroneous accents, etc., are potential and even inevitable. Surely, nobody is secure from failures, sometimes caused just by time shortage. But here it is not so much important to fear to make mistakes; it is more important to be more attentive to one’s own language, to analyze one’s own and someone else’s mistakes and constantly work over their elimination.

On the whole separate drawbacks of speech can be compensated by its general high culture, but it should be remembered: who thinks clearly, he speaks clearly. Therefore it is good, when a clear idea is expressed so much clearly by means of another language.

Moreover, translation as the secondary type of information can sometimes be somewhat better in form, than original, because an experienced translator, sometimes even unconsciously, can slightly correct and improve the information translated, to accent key points more clearly, remove unnecessary repetitions, making the utterance more logical, at the same time preserving complete adequacy to the original text.

The well known saying is sometimes applicable to oral translation, “The more it changes the more it remains the same” – i.e. in this case it is possible and necessary to convey an idea adequately in another language, change the word order of the original, making necessary lexical-grammatical transformations.

Ability to choose the most suitable word (unit of translation) quickly and exactly, especially during the interpretation into the native language, where we face an uncountable number of lexical-grammatical variants, enormous language resources, is of utmost importance for oral translation.

„Іноді страждаєш, що думка не перейшла в слово… – ці страждання даються лишень обраним, дурень завжди задоволений тим, що сказав“.

Ф. Достоєвський „Підліток“