Coping With Culture in Media Interpreting

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Coping with Culture in Media Interpreting

Franz Pöchhacker a
a
Centre for Translation Studies, University of Vienna, Austria
Online Publication Date: 01 May 2007
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Coping with Culture in Media
Interpreting
Franz Pöchhacker
Centre for Translation Studies, University of Vienna, Austria
Live broadcast simultaneous interpreting on television is widely acknowledged as
one of the most challenging and stressful forms of screen translation, and
translational activity in general. Aside from experience-based accounts by media
interpreters describing the specific working conditions and constraints in TV
interpreting, the literature includes some interpreter and user surveys as well as
case studies of physiological stress, but very few corpus-based analyses of actual
media interpreting output. Based on a substantial corpus (approx. 64,000 words) of

three comparable sets of English German TV interpreting for a US Presidential
Debate, this paper examines how highly professional media interpreters cope with
such complex source-text material as cultural references in simultaneous interpret-
ing. Framed by a functionalist account of the communicative event and the
professional assignment, the corpus-based analysis presents quantitative evidence
of how the interpreters cope (or not) as well as qualitative data illustrating particular
Downloaded At: 23:26 18 February 2009
problem-solving strategies.
doi: 10.1080/13670050802153798
Keywords: media interpreting, TV interpreting, culture-specific items,

acronyms
Introduction
Compared with such major forms of audiovisual translation as dubbing and
subtitling, media interpreting is a relatively marginal domain, in terms of both
volume and scope of application. Within the field of interpreting studies,
however, media settings constitute an increasingly significant area of practice
and research, with specific characteristics and challenges. The fact that media
interpreters are often called upon to make international content, such as news
coverage or interviews with guests from abroad, accessible to domestic
audiences under the constraints of a particular social institution (i.e. the
broadcasting station) puts media interpreting into an intermediate position
between the international and the intrasocial sphere of intercultural contacts
(cf. Pöchhacker, 2004: 15ff.). It thus straddles the traditional divide between
international conference interpreting and community-based interpreting, with
interpreting for deaf audiences falling into the latter domain. Within the wider
field of translation studies, moreover, media interpreting holds particular
attraction as a research topic at the interface between interpreting-specific
concerns and broader theoretical issues of audiovisual and multidimensional
translation. The present paper contributes to this field with a corpus-based
analysis of media interpreting performance which focuses on the problem of
translating culture-bound items. Given the complexity of the topic, I will begin
0907-676X/07/02 123-20 $20.00/0 – 2007 F. Pöchhacker

Perspectives: Studies in Translatology Vol. 15, No. 2, 2007
123
124 Perspectives: Studies in Translatology
with some necessary conceptual distinctions regarding media interpreting and

point to some of the research carried out to date. Within the framework of
functionalist translation theory, I will then formulate the research question for
the corpus-based analysis; that is, how do highly professional interpreters
working under very stressful conditions cope with the task of rendering
culture-specific references? To what extent does their output reflect constraint-
related strategies and norm-governed translational behaviour? Following a
description of the corpus, this question will be addressed in my empirical
analysis in both quantitative and qualitative terms, with special emphasis on
the rendition of acronyms.
Interpreting in the Media

Types and distinctions
While it is beyond the scope of this paper to provide a comprehensive
account of media interpreting and the research carried out so far, it is
important to point out that there are more than one ways of ‘interpreting in the
media’ and that the notion of media interpreting leaves ample scope for
definition. To begin with, we need to specify the type of ‘media’ in question.
Prototypically, media interpreting would refer to broadcast mass media, i.e.
radio and television, but newer types of electronic media and transmission
such as webcasting also need to be taken into account. Irrespective of the mode
or channel of transmission, media content may be live or prerecorded
another distinction of particular relevance to interpreting, which, as such, is
always done ‘live’ for the here and now but may benefit in some prerecording
scenarios from previewing or remastering options.
A basic choice in media interpreting, as in any interpreting, is of course that
between the consecutive and the simultaneous mode, even though the
boundaries between the two modes are not always clear-cut. Dialogue
interpreting in talk shows, for instance, usually involves whispered (simulta-
neous) interpreting for studio guests, especially of questions by the host, and a
consecutive, or semi-simultaneous, rendition of foreign-language utterances
for the benefit of the studio and/or broadcast audience. In the case of deaf TV
audiences, on the other hand, everything spoken will usually be interpreted
simultaneously into signed language.
These examples also highlight the complexity and variability of the
interaction constellations in media interpreting: the interpreter may be on
site (‘on the set’) to enable live communication between two or more
interlocutors, with or without an audience in the studio and sometimes even
acting in a dual capacity (see Chiaro, 2002; Mack, 2002). Alternatively, the
interpreter’s task may be to render, usually in the simultaneous mode,
broadcasts of events that occur independently in a different location, from
moon landings to royal weddings (Kurz, 1997). In the latter case, dual-channel
transmission technology would permit access to the (spoken-language)
interpretation on a separate channel; more commonly, though, the simulta-
neous interpretation is heard as a voice-over, largely covering the original also
Coping with Culture in Media Interpreting 125
for those who would prefer to hear more of the source language they
understand.
Previous research
Leaving aside the problem of distinguishing between systematic research
and descriptive publications drawing mainly on professional experience, the
literature on media interpreting to date primarily covers the specific features
of this particular setting as well as the issue of performance quality. Aside
from references to the earliest instances of (radio) broadcast interpreting in the
1930s, many contributions include a contrastive account of interpreting in
media settings (usually on TV) and in international conferences. Setting-
specific features include: assignments at short notice and at unusual hours;
working with monitors and nonstandard consoles; and an increased sense of
stress resulting from broad exposure to a mass-media audience (see e.g. Kurz,
1990, 2002; Mack, 2002; Russo, 1995; Snelling, 1997).
The issue of quality in media interpreting was addressed in particular by
Kurz (1996), who extended her user expectation studies to TV representatives
and interpreters. Compared to the rather stable pattern of quality expecta-
tions among users of simultaneous conference interpreting, she found

consistent deviations with regard to completeness and aspects of delivery
such as voice quality, native accent and fluency (see e.g. Kurz, 2001).
Interestingly, the ‘users’ consulted in these surveys were institutional clients
rather than end-users, and indeed very little research has been done on the
latter. Elsagir (2000), for one, used a five-page questionnaire to ask 58
persons about their general expectations and preferences after having them
watch two sample performances of simultaneous interpreting (SI) on a
German TV talkshow. Unlike Kurz (1996), she found that the criterion with
the highest average rating (on a four-point scale) was completeness (3.5),
over and above such aspects as fluency (3.2) and pleasant voice (3.1), though
the latter were mentioned most frequently as the best features of the two
interpretations under study.
With a distinct focus on audience perception and assessment rather than
general expectations, Chiaro (2002) surveyed an experimental audience of T&I
students and community members without linguistic expertise after a viewing
of a talkshow interview with the host doubling as (consecutive) interpreter.
Working with deaf audience members, Steiner (1998) conducted an experi-
mental study on the comprehensibility of different types of signed-language
transmissions by the BBC, and found that many deaf viewers judged language
production by hearing interpreters as well as deaf signers by aesthetic rather
than linguistic criteria, expressing a clear preference for signers who produced
language ‘with authority’. Live interpreting was thus assessed less favourably,
as ‘certain fumbles, corrections, and coping strategies were perceived by the
viewing audience and affected their confidence in the interpretation’ (Steiner,
1998: 131).
In addition to experiential descriptions and questionnaire-based studies, of
both user expectations and (experimental) audience response, there are a
number of discourse-based analyses of interpreting performances in the
media. In terms of interaction constellation, these range from on-screen liaison

interpreting in talkshow or current-affairs interviews (e.g. Straniero Sergio,
1999; Wadensjö, 2008) to SI in TV coverage of independently occurring events,
with or without on-site interpreting (e.g. Amato, 2002; Pöchhacker, 1997;
Strolz, 2000). Also, a number of researchers have availed themselves of
broadcast institutional encounters which include the performance of inter-
preters (e.g. Mason & Stewart, 2001; Pym, 1999).
While the body of research on media interpreting may still be small, the
variety of interaction types and interpreting arrangements obviously allows
for a great number of different research questions and methodological
approaches. The study presented here singles out a particular case of an
interpreted media event, analysing a sizeable corpus with an ostensibly
narrow analytical focus. The research question how simultaneous inter-
preters working in high-pressure media settings handle culture-bound
references relates to a central issue in the functionalist theory of translation
and interpreting (Reiß & Vermeer, 1984). What is more, this question has in
part already been raised by Kurz (1993) in connection with precisely the media
interpreting event under study. The analysis presented here will thus address
broader skopos-theoretical issues in simultaneous interpreting as well as
corpus-specific challenges and interpreters’ coping strategies.
Coping with Culture

Conceptual framework
Functionalist translation theory (skopos theory, theory of translatorial
action), which came to the fore in Germany in the early 1980s, no longer
needs a lengthy introduction (see Nord, 1997). Suffice it to say that scholars
working within this theoretical framework construe interpreting (and transla-
tion in general) as a communicative process linking different cultural systems;
the interpreter is assumed to make choices in order to render the original
speech ‘functional’ (comprehensible, meaningful, coherent, etc.) for the target-
cultural audience in keeping with the purpose (‘skopos’) of the assignment
and the communicative event. Figure 1, adapted from my earlier work
(Pöchhacker, 1994a, 1994b, 1995), is an attempt to relate the major levels of
analysis, or contextual dimensions (professional assignment, communicative
event, situation, text), to the functional principles and forces guiding the
interpreter’s translational behaviour.
Each ‘level’ contains numerous elements and variables and would require
a detailed model of its own. Central to the functionalist account is the
‘situation’, construed as (participants’ perception of) a constellation of
interactants, with their roles and sociocultural backgrounds and their mutual
knowledge, assessment and orientation (see Pöchhacker, 2005: 689). No less
relevant is the analysis of the ‘text’ as a multidimensional entity comprising
nonverbal visual and vocal as well as verbal components. From the listener/
audience perspective, the (target) text is particularly complex, as it includes
elements of the original speech from across the verbal-paralinguistic-kinesic
Translatorial Action
(CLIENT–EXPERT contract)
P I
r HYPERTEXT
n
o (communicative event)
s
f. t.
E S SITUATION
N
t k
T o
h o F
E r
i p u
m
o n Seg- X ment
c T s
s s c
t Strategy
Figure 1 Multilevel analytical framework
continuum as well as the interpreter’s verbal and paraverbal production (see

Pöchhacker, 1994b).
Considering the analytical depth required for a detailed account of
interpreters’ behaviour, the schematic visualisation offered in Figure 1 can

merely serve to drive home the point that interpreting strategies for a given
text segment cannot be dissociated from the multiple levels of ‘context’
(assignment, event, situation, text) or from broader guiding principles such as
ethical and institutional norms, the skopos of the assignment and the
communicative function of the ‘text-in-situation’. Similarly, orientation at the
skopos alone, as some summary applications of the theory would have it, is
insufficient to guide strategic processing decisions for a given text segment
such as a culture-specific reference.
Function and ‘cultural transfer’

One of the few interpreting-specific examples discussed in Vermeer’s
seminal work on skopos theory (Reiß & Vermeer, 1984) is the assignment
of rendering a campaign speech by a US politician into Spanish for
SpanishAmerican citizens, or into German. Whereas in the former case the
function of the target text would be roughly the same as for the English
original, i.e. canvassing for votes, a translation of the speech into German
would serve a different purpose, namely to inform a foreign audience about
the candidate’s campaigning. This functional shift, from ‘instrumental’ to
‘documentary translation’ (Nord, 1997: 47), would imply different transla-
tional strategies, not least for ‘culture-specific’ items, which may require
explanation or even be deliberately omitted.
Precisely this skopos-theoretical issue is raised by Kurz (1993) in her paper
on live TV interpreting for the event that is also the subject of the present
analysis the 1992 Bush-Clinton-Perot presidential debate. Citing Reiß and
Vermeer’s (1984) claim which in turn echoes the functionalist argument by
Kirchhoff (1976/2002) that the interpreter ‘would consider the culture-
specific background of his addressees, providing them with additional
information where required or omitting things they could be expected to
know’, Kurz (1993: 443) questions whether this can be substantiated by the
case under study.
She gives two main reasons why this particular assignment ‘did not imply a
different translation strategy’, even though
the interpreters translating the Bush-Clinton-Perot debate into German
were aware that they were working for an audience which was not
composed of potential voters and that the purpose, therefore, was not to
convince TV viewers to support one or the other candidate. (Kurz, 1993:
443)
One of Kurz’ arguments relates to the broader issue of culture-specific rhetoric,
and is best restated here in full:
(. . .) Bill Clinton at several points referred to specific individuals (an
unmarried mother in Chicago, a factory worker in the Midwest, etc.),
giving their names and describing their anxieties and hopes. This type of
rhetoric is completely alien to the political culture of Germany and
Austria. Still, as an interpreter, I would not ‘adapt’ the style of the
original text. After all, the non-American audience should get a first-
hand impression of a candidate’s personality and way of speaking, even

though they are not potential voters. (Kurz, 1993: 444)
More than a rejection of the skopos-theoretical notion of ‘cultural transfer’ a
vague idea which is also questionable for the essentialism implied by the
transfer metaphor (see Martı́n de León, 2005), the position expressed by Kurz
(1993) actually reflects a departure from the ‘instrumental translation’ strategy
(or norm) implied by the hallowed principle of ‘equivalent effect’ (see e.g.
Déjean Le Féal, 1990: 155; Seleskovitch, 1978: 102). The interpreter would thus
opt for documentary translation, informing target-text receivers about the
content and form of the original rather than recreating the (appellative)
function intended by the speaker in the source-cultural context (cf. also
Marzocchi, 2005).
And yet, this functional shift may not really be a matter of strategic
choice on the part of the interpreter. Indeed, the constellation of interaction
for the target text is such that ‘functional invariance’ is hardly conceivable
anyway. Given the change in audience and political as well as sociocultural
context, the communicative function cannot not change, and the interpreter
has little choice but to supply a target text that serves its purpose within an
essentially different communicative event. That purpose is defined within
its own institutional context (in this case, the news and current affairs
department of Austria’s public broadcasting corporation ORF) subject to
particular norms and expectations as well as the interpreter’s own
professional ethics and standards. (As suggested by Kurz (1990: 173), the
media interpreter might be asked to provide a summary or commentary
rather than a full rendition, which s/he may or may not accept or be able
to do.) Hence the relevance of the various layers of analysis representing
the socioprofessional dimension of interpreting, in the media as well as in
other settings.
Norms and constraints

The second argument advanced by Kurz (1993) against a strategy of cultural
adaptation in interpreting the Bush-Clinton-Perot debate into German is based
on cognitive-linguistic concerns, and formulated as follows:
Although it would have been preferable at some points to insert a br[ie]f
explanation for the sake of the non-American audience e.g. a definition
of ‘trickle-down economy’ , the interpreters simply did not have time
for it. In view of the enormous time pressure a salient feature of
simultaneous interpreting, exacerbated by the high speed of delivery in
this case they could do nothing but stick fairly close to the original text,
having no chance to add ‘hyperinformation’ for their listeners. (Kurz,
1993: 444)
This statement vividly illustrates the tension between what is translationally
desirable and what is feasible under the circumstances, i.e. between the
interpreter’s own performance norms and quality standards, on the one hand,
and the cognitive processing constraints resulting mainly from high source-
text delivery speeds, on the other. Whereas the skopos-theoretical notion of
‘making the text functional within the target-cultural environment’ is clearly

seen here as an influential principle shaping interpreters’ norms, actual
translational behaviour under the challenging conditions of live broadcast SI
is ostensibly governed by cognitive constraints. In other words, in an attempt
to validate the theoretical precepts of skopos and translational norms, the
interpreting scholar comes up against the controlling force of processing-
capacity limits, as described in Gile’s (1995) efforts model.
Not surprisingly perhaps, this battleground of conflicting forces transla-
tional norms versus cognitive constraints can also be reached from the
opposite direction, as demonstrated by Shlesinger (1999), who set out to test a
theory of cognitive (working-memory) limitations and came up against the
controlling force of interpreters’ performance norms. In the same vein as Kurz
(1993) in the quotation above, Shlesinger presents evidence for a ‘good-
enough’ norm that she characterises as ‘an intersubjective legitimization of
standards which may be perceived as less than optimal, but are judged to
be satisfactory concessions to the constraints of the situation’ (Shlesinger,
1999: 73).
As strategies for coping with cognitive (over)load in SI are thus closely
intertwined with considerations of communicative function within a given
context of interaction, the question facing the researcher is how to distinguish
between the impact of cognitive limitations and of interpreters’ translational
norms. Mindful of Shlesinger’s insights in the face of this quandary, the
present analysis will focus on input segments that can be assumed to
be particularly demanding in terms of cognitive processing capacity while
at the same time requiring the interpreter to make a strategic decision
regarding functional (i.e. target-cultural) adequacy. These ‘problem triggers’,
in Gile’s (1995) terminology, are ‘culture-specific items’ in the source text,
variously referred to also as ‘realia’, ‘cultural references’, ‘cultural markers’,
‘culture-bound references’ or ‘culture bumps’ (Leppihalme, 1996) and

notoriously hard to define.
Culture-specific (or not)

In broad anthropological terms (e.g. Goodenough, 1964), culture can be
defined as shared knowledge and beliefs and ways of seeing and doing things
in a social system comprised of human individuals. Culture can be seen as
created by and through language use, and at the same time as encompassing
language as one of its main practices, i.e. shared ways of doing things. On this
understanding, culture and language are inseparably intertwined, and there
should be nothing linguistic, in principle, which is not bound to a culture. In
other words, linguistic expression is invariably culture-bound, hence the view,
in functionalist translation theory, that translators (and interpreters) work with
and between two (or more) different systems of ‘language & culture’ bearing
in mind, however, that ‘a culture’ is neither monolithic nor homogeneous but
rather a sociocultural construct in itself. Interpreting, then, invariably implies
change, re-creation and adaptation (under a given skopos).
Thus, what is referred to as ‘culture-specific’ in text-based (including
nonverbal) communication is hardly distinct and separable from the rest of

language, like raisins in a cake, but rather a matter of degree; that is, the degree
to which a given communicative feature is bound up with the shared
knowledge required to understand it. An Anglo-American speaker starting
off with a joke, for instance, may be said to invoke a culture-specific rhetorical
pattern (cf. Pavlicek & Pöchhacker, 2002), but such a communicative practice is
less ‘non-universal’ than, say, his reference to ‘Willow Run’ (as in the present
corpus). Likewise, a presidential candidate addressing his political rival by his
first name does what is more common in his culture than in others, but
without making his utterance as inaccessible to the culturally uninitiated as by
referring to the ‘GOP’.
Our understanding of what is ‘culture-specific’ therefore hinges on knowl-
edge and the degree to which it is (not) generally shared within the
constellation of interactants (‘situation’) as modelled in terms of the general,
specific, contextual and individual sociocultural knowledge and competence
of each discourse participant (cf. Pöchhacker, 2005: 689). This focus on
knowledge makes it very difficult to operationalise the way more closely
culture-bound forms of expression are understood and what is or must
be done by the translator/interpreter to make their referents accessible to the
target-text audience. Among the most ambitious attempts to do so is the
analysis of ‘culture in texts’ by Floros (2003). Another, more reception-
oriented, empirical approach was taken by Leppihalme (1996), who found
variable patterns of intelligibility for different types of allusions. Her work also
proved inspirational to the corpus-based study of ‘extralinguistic culture-
bound reference’ in subtitling by Pedersen (2007), whose insights on
translational strategies and constraints are highly relevant to the present
analysis.
Leppihalme and Pedersen and many other authors who have grappled
with culture as a translation problem, particularly in literary works have
found it useful to narrow the focus of analysis to discrete items. The present
contribution is no exception and, as one of the first corpus-based analyses of
cultural references in SI, singles out elements such as proper nouns and key
phrases that, admittedly, are merely the tip of the cultural iceberg confronting
interpreters as intercultural navigators.
Corpus
The case under study is the first of three televised debates between the main
candidates in the 1992 US presidential election George Bush, Bill Clinton and
Ross Perot. The 90-minute live programme, aired in prime time on 11 October
1992, was carried by three broadcasters in Germany and Austria with live
simultaneous interpreting into German, each relying on its own team of four
interpreters. The corpus thus comprises the original English debate and the
renditions of three teams of interpreters (later referred to as Teams A, B and C)
working on the same broadcast under comparable conditions. While the
original debate took place before a large on-site audience as well as TV
viewers, the German broadcasts (in the early hours of 12 October) were
addressed to the German-speaking television audience only, making this a

typical case of ‘Type 2’ in Mack’s (2002) terms, i.e. live broadcast SI for an
independently occurring televised event in another language and culture.
One can assume that the interpreters were contracted several weeks ahead
of time and would have had time to prepare for this assignment, which most
of them were familiar with from earlier occasions. The TV programme as a
communicative event also included an anchorperson and commentator, who
offered the TV audience an introduction to the event as well as an ex-post
analysis. One station (ZDF) briefly switched from the rebroadcast to the
anchor in the studio a few times, but for the most part, the interpreters were on
their own for one-and-a-half hours in making the live broadcast accessible to
the German-speaking audience.
Source-text characteristics
The orthographically transcribed corpus of the original English and the
three German videorecorded versions of the debate runs to some 50,000
words. Each set of texts is clearly structured according to the well defined
format of the debate, i.e. two-minute answers to questions from a panel of
three journalists, with one-minute comments or rebuttals by the other two
candidates. There were 18 questions, six for each candidate, and a round of
closing statements. Candidates naturally tried to pack as much of their
message as possible into their allotted time, and typically linked up their
response to the question with their well rehearsed campaign themes, if not
preformed speech segments. Thus, despite instances of hesitation in the early
part of the response, particularly by George Bush, speech rates for all three
candidates were rather high, amounting on average to more than 180 words
per minute. Pauses (of 1.5 seconds or more) and voiced hesitation were quite
infrequent: while the average pause time per minute for all originals
amounted to 1.2 seconds, the median for the 19 turns of each candidate was
zero, as was the median for voiced hesitations per minute.
The roughly comparable speaking speeds in terms of words per minute
(Bush: 185, Clinton: 186, Perot: 188) actually hide some interesting differences.
When measured in syllables per minute, adjusted for pauses of 1.5 seconds
and more, the speech rates of Clinton and Perot (280 and 275, respectively) are
distinctly higher than that of Bush, whose average rate was 262 syllables per
minute. (Whether this was due to the use of shorter words or a different
distribution of articulatory pauses would need to be established in additional
analyses.) By comparison, the average speed of English native speakers in the
ICSB Corpus analysed in Pöchhacker (1994a) was 246 syllables per minute.
The high speech rates are indicative of high cognitive input loads for the
interpreters. While one cannot assume a linear correlation between input rate
and information density, the nature of this particular communicative event
made the candidates’ speeches particularly rich in information (in the
processing-related sense of the word). Given the importance of the debates
as a sort of climax in the campaign, only a few weeks before the election, the
candidates would have prepared, or been prepared, very thoroughly for their
rhetorical performance. As a result, and all the more so within the time-
constrained format of the debate, the candidates resorted to well rehearsed

statements and often very detailed factual information. The use of numbers is
a case in point; another is cultural references. The latter are explicitly
mentioned also in the paper on the 1992 debates by Kurz (1993: 444), who
speaks of ‘problems, such as high speed of delivery implying the need to
compress and sum up, culture-specific references, homespun phrases, etc.’. In
the light of the above discussion of the notion of culture-specific (or culture-
bound) references, these will now be identified in the corpus as a basis for the
subsequent analysis of how the interpreters coped with them in producing
their target texts.
Culture in the corpus

As explained above, the present investigation focuses on discrete and rather
clear-cut cases of culture-bound elements in the corpus, as identified
subjectively by the author in a ‘bottom-up’ analysis of the source-text
transcripts. The seven types of culture-bound references selected for further
study mainly relate to ‘extralinguistic’ phenomena, i.e. to ‘realia’ such as
persons, places, institutions (political as well as cultural) and programmes.
Others can be characterised as ‘intralinguistic’ (cf. Leppihalme, 1996: 2),
including economic jargon, campaign buzzwords and idiomatic phrases. The
latter category highlights the fuzzy boundaries of this categorisation and links
back to the acknowledgement, expressed above, of all language use being
culture-bound.
A total of 234 culture-bound references were identified in the 15,800-word
source-text corpus. A breakdown by the seven categories is shown in Figure 2.
The most frequent type of culture-bound reference in the corpus, account-
ing for over a quarter of the total (28%), is names of US institutions (65),
including such understandably overrepresented items as ‘Congress’ (21) and
70
60 65
50
40 47
30 36
20 30
26
10 18 12
0
s
es
ns
es
n
s
s
m
se
m
go
m
tio
ny
ra
ra
ar
na
na
itu
og
ro
ph
.j
st
Ac
on
e
on
pr
ac
ic
In
n/
rs
ec
at
Pl
io
Pe
m
l./
at
io
Po
sl
Id
gi
Le
Figure 2 Distribution of types of culture-bound items (number of tokens)
‘the White House’ (10). The second largest category is references to persons
(names), which make up one fifth of all items under analysis. There are 36
items classified as political/economic jargon (15%) and 30 US place names
(13%), including 10 instances of ‘Washington’. Reference to legislation and

programmes is made 26 times (11%), and only a small number of items (18)
comes under the heading of idiomatic phrases (8%). Twelve instances of
acronyms, mainly referring to political institutions, were included in a
separate category, which represents 5% of the total.
As indicated above, several of the items occurred more than once. The 234
‘tokens’ of cultural references thus correspond to 122 different items (‘types’),
the most frequent of which are listed in Table 1.
As can be seen from the list in Table 1, a culture-bound reference need not
necessarily be a translation problem, or ‘problem trigger’ in SI. This is obvious
for place names such as ‘Washington’, ‘Arkansas’ and ‘St. Louis’, but applies
also to such internationally known institutions as the US ‘Congress’ and ‘the
White House’. In cognitive terms, the familiar and straightforward linguistic
expressions are presumably linked with the relevant encyclopaedic knowledge
even in the target-cultural audience, ensuring intelligibility both for the
interpreters and their listeners.
More challenging are expressions pertaining to political and economic
jargon (e.g. ‘tax & spend’, ‘gridlock government’, ‘trickle-down economics’) or
proper nouns like the ‘Fed(eral Reserve)’, especially when referred to in
abbreviation. Indeed, abbreviations, more specifically acronyms, are a parti-
cularly interesting type of culture-bound item in the corpus. They refer mainly
to institutions (e.g. DEA, FDA, NIH) and only rarely to persons (FDR) or
economic jargon (MFN). The latter example again illustrates that some items
are less ‘culture-specific’ than others. While MFN (‘most-favoured nation’)
status plays a crucial role from the perspective of the USA as a leading trading
partner and is thus a key term in US economic debate, it is in fact part of
international trade law and not specific to the USA. (Other cases of acronyms
in the corpus were BMW and KGB, which were not counted as references to
US culture.)
Table 1 Most frequent culture-bound items
Item Frequency
Congress 21
Washington 10
White House 10
tax & spend 9
Medicare 8
Arkansas 5
Family values 5
Fed(eral Reserve) 4
gridlock (government) 4
Medicaid 4
Oregon Plan 4
Reagan 4
St. Louis (Missouri) 4
Trickle-down (economics) 4
Metaphorically speaking, acronyms are the ‘tip of the tip’ of the cultural
iceberg. As the linguistic expressions used to refer to the realia in question are
extremely non-redundant and non-transparent, they leave little room for
inferencing and are either grasped and understood or not. Acronyms are
therefore highly vulnerable in the (simultaneous) interpreting process (see
Gile, 1995: 174) and at the same time constitute a great translational challenge,
presumably requiring explicitation for the target-cultural audience. As an
ideal test case for interpreters’ coping strategies with regard to both processing
constraints and translational norms, acronyms will be the focus of the
empirical analysis presented in the following section. In light of the theoretical
discussion it can be hypothesised that the target texts show evidence of both
strategies for coping with high input load (e.g. compression, omission) and
target-oriented strategies, including explicitation, to make the interpretation
(more) meaningful (‘functional’) for the TV audience.
Analysis
It should be recalled at the outset that the orthographic transcript of the
interpreters’ renditions is a regrettably incomplete, and indeed truncated,
representation of their communicative production, neglecting prosodic fea-
tures and their synchronisation with the image on the screen. Even so, the
transcripts are a revealing source of qualitative data, and will be treated as
such in the subsequent analysis.
At the same time, the data also lend themselves to quantification, especially
for corpus-wide features, if only to indicate the overall pattern of results to be
discussed in more detail on the basis of contextualised examples.
Quantitative analysis
Output rate
Before looking at the fate of culture-bound references in the interpretations,
a corpus-wide comparison of source- and target-text delivery rates is called for
to test the assertion by Kurz (1993: 444) regarding ‘high speed of delivery
implying the need to compress and sum up’. To the extent that this would be
reflected in interpreters’ speaking less, it is not fully borne out by the data.
Calculated in syllables per minute and adjusted for pauses of 1.5 seconds or
more, the interpreters’ speech rates are not substantially below the average of
271 (926) syllables per minute found for the source-text corpus (including
questions). Indeed, there appears to be more variability among the three teams
of interpreters and presumably also within each team of four than
differences between originals and interpretations. While the overall average
speech rate in target texts is 265 (937) syllables per minute, there are marked
differences between the averages for Team A (2459 25 syll./min.), Team B

(282942 syll./min.) and Team C (267933 syll./min.). Indeed, the average
speech rate of interpreters in Team B even exceeds not only the overall average
but also that of the fastest speaker in the source-text corpus (i.e. Clinton’s
average rate of 280 syllables per minute). Based on these findings, the
interpreters in this corpus do not necessarily resort to compression by
speaking less. In other words, omissions in the target text are not invariably
due to reductive strategies necessitated by the high input speeds.
Examples on record
Given the heterogeneity of the numerous culture-bound items identified in
the corpus, an across-the-board quantification of renditions would hardly be
meaningful. Within the scope of this paper I will therefore limit myself to
analysing the set of examples identified by Kurz (1993) as particularly
challenging in this debate. Using a simple scoring system, I classified the
renditions in the three interpreted versions as either ‘zero’ (0), ‘partial’ (1) or
‘full or functional’ (2), and calculated a rendition score as the percentage of the
total score possible for each item (type), i.e. the full score of ‘2’ multiplied by
the number of occurrences (tokens). Results are shown in Table 2.
On the whole, the rendition scores for these selected cultural references are
quite low. With the exception of the idiomatic phrase ‘competitors are cleaning
our plate’, most items resulted in zero or partial renditions. Even the economic
jargon expression ‘trickle down’, which was used four times (by Clinton),
achieved a score of no more than 25%. None of the interpreters managed to
render Ross Perot’s reference to ‘Lawrence Welk music’, which was omitted by
one (Team A) and misinterpreted by the other two as ‘not being loudmouthed’
(‘keine großen Töne spucken’) and ‘not playing [to] the large world’ (‘spiele
hier nicht 3 f der großen Welt’), apparently from mishearing the original as
‘large world music’.
Table 2 Rendition scores for six selected examples (cf. Kurz, 1993)
Item Team A Team B Team C % score

trickle-down economics 4 2 0 (6/24) 25%
(4)
a job third shift in a Dairy 0 2 0 (2/6) 33%
Queen
Mary Annie and Edward 0 0 0 0%
Davis in Nashua, New
Hampshire
playing Lawrence Welk 0 0 0 0%
music
five-star migraine 1 1 n.a. (2/4) 50%
headache
competitors cleaning our 2 2 2 (6/6) 100%
plate
39% 39% 13%
Clinton’s complex reference to two individuals in Nashua, New Hamp-

shire, which Kurz (1993) uses as an example of culture-specific rhetoric that
should be rendered as such in the target text, is omitted in all three interpreted
versions, possibly as a result of the excessive processing load exerted by the
two two-part proper nouns in combination with two place names. (Details on
the renditions are given in Example 1 below.)
Acronyms
Turning now to the rendition of acronyms, the overall pattern is quite
similar. Only a minority of the acronyms were fully or functionally rendered in
the interpretations. Table 3 presents the scores and percentages for ten tokens
of six different acronyms, in the order of their percentage score. (The single
Table 3 Rendition scores for 10 tokens of 6 acronyms (with pause-adjusted original

delivery rate)
Item Orig. (speed) Team A Team B Team C % score

FDR Perot (269) 0 2 2 (4/6) 67%
DEA (2) Bush (252) 0 0 4 (4/12) 33%
NIH Bush (243) 2 0 0 (2/6) 33%
MFN (2) Bush (273) 0 3 0 (3/12) 25%
FDA (2) Perot (277) 0 1 1 (2/12) 17%
PAC (2) Perot (267) 0 0 0 (0/12) 0%
10% 30% 35%
occurrences of ‘ABC’ and ‘PBS’, both in the moderator’s introductory

statement, are not included. It is interesting to note, however, that while
ABC (American Broadcasting Corporation) did not pose any problems, PBS
(Public Broadcasting System) was misinterpreted in the Team C version as CBS
(Columbia Broadcasting System) a perfect illustration of signal vulnerability
as a result of minimal redundancy.)
The least problematic item was ‘FDR’, with two full/functional renditions,
and the most omission-prone acronym was ‘PAC’ (political action committee).
Institutional terms such as ‘DEA’ (Drug Enforcement Agency) and ‘FDA’
(Food and Drug Administration), with which the interpreters in question
would certainly have been familiar, were rendered fully in only one, and
partially in two of the respective interpretations. Clearly, there is both a
general trend (towards zero renditions) and considerable variability among
the interpreters in the three teams.
The latter suggests a need to explore these quantitative findings more fully
by considering the items in context and comparing the interpreters’ problem-
solving and production strategies.
Culture in context
Lack of space does not permit me to give more than one example of the
items listed in Table 2, and I will single out Clinton’s complex name-and-place
reference discussed in the article by Kurz (1993).
Example 1: ‘I’ve met them’
Clinton: I’ve met them, people like Mary Annie and Edward
Davis in Nashua, New Hampshire, all over this country,
they cannot even buy medicine.
Team A: . . . Es gibt Menschen überall im Land, die es sich nicht leisten
können Medikamente zu kaufen.
(There are people all over the country who cannot
afford to buy medicine.)
Team B: Viele, ich kenne Beispiele aus New Hampshire, müssen diese
Wahl treffen, entweder Arzneimittel oder etwas zu essen.
(Many, I know examples from New Hampshire, have to
make that choice, either medicine or something to eat.)
Team C: Nehm’n sie die vielen Leute, von denen man in der Presse hier
in Amerika liest, die nicht einmal Pillen kaufen können.
(Take those many people you read about in the press
here in America, who can’t even buy pills.)
As indicated in Table 2, all interpreters omit Clinton’s reference to the

specific individuals and place, though it is difficult to say whether this was
a strategic choice in the face of excessive processing load or an attempt to
spare the target audience an excessively culture-bound and largely irrele-
vant reference. The Team B version retains at least the state (‘New
Hampshire’) and repeats the rendition of a preceding utterance in the
original (‘the choice between food and medicine’). The interpreter in Team
C, rather strikingly, resorts to a clause-length generalisation-cum-substitution
for the reference to individual people. As Clinton is presumably trying to
cultivate his image of being close to the people, substituting his ‘I’ve met
them’ with a reference to people one reads about in the papers clearly
changes the function of this particular utterance in a way that contravenes
the speaker’s intention.
Example 2: ‘FDR’
In the first of three examples of acronyms, the customary initials ‘FDR’ are
used by Ross Perot to refer to wartime President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in
a statement criticising the overrepresentation of working-class youth in the
military.
Perot: very unlike WWII when FDR’s sons flew missions,

everybody went.
Team A: Im Zweiten Weltkrieg war es * ha- * waren auch andere junge
Leute eingesetzt.
(In WWII it was * w-* other young people served too.)
Team B: Im Zweiten Weltkrieg haben die Söhne von F- Franklin

Delano Roosevelt selbst Einsätze geflogen, das war was
anderes,
(In WWII the sons of F- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
themselves flew missions, that was different,)
Team C: im Zweiten Weltkrieg war das ein bißchen anders, da sind
vielleicht auch Söhne von FDR Roosevelt gef-flogen
(in WWII it was a bit different, maybe sons of FDR
Roosevelt also fl- flew planes then)
The message is lost completely by the interpreter in Team A. Instead of the
President’s sons, the target text only has a reference to ‘other young people’
doing military service. The other two interpreters, on the other hand, not only
retain the reference to the President’s sons but also make his name explicit and
thus accessible to the target-cultural audience. The interpreter in Team B
apparently abandons the strategy of ‘retention’ after only the first letter and
shifts to a strategy of ‘specification by completion’ (cf. Pedersen, 2007). Less
elegantly, and with a hedge (‘maybe’) that weakens the utterance’s illocu-
tionary force, the interpreter in Team C follows through with the retention but
then spells out the last name for explicitation. In both cases, the cognitively
efficient strategy of retention is ultimately superseded by the perceived need
to make the reference (more) meaningful to the target audience.
The strategy of ‘specification by completion’ (Pedersen, 2007) can also be
observed in the following example, though only in the version by Team A.
Example 3: ‘NIH’
Bush: we’ve got the best researchers in the world out there at
NIH working the problem
Team A: Wir haben die besten Forscher in unseren National Institutes

of Health.
(We have the best researchers in our National Institutes
of Health.)
Team B: ich glaube, daß wir die besten Forscher der Welt haben . . .
(I think that we have the best researchers in the
world . . .)
Team C: ich glaube wir haben die besten Forscher in der Welt, die an
dem Problem arbeiten
(I believe we have the best researchers in the world, who
are working on this problem)
Only the interpreter in Team A spells out the acronym, retaining the full
name in the original language. While the other two interpreters stay closer to
the original wording (‘best in the world’), the reference to the health research
institution is dropped completely, possibly because it is hard to render
culturally meaningful for the target audience.
Example 4: ‘FDA’
In his statement on new drugs to treat HIV infections, Perot twice refers to
the Food and Drug Administration by its acronym. In each of the three
versions, the acronym is omitted at least once.
Perot: I would sit down with the FDA [ . . .]

[. . .] you don’t have to go through this ten-year cycle
that FDA goes through on new drugs.
Team A: ich mich mit den Drogenfahndern zusammensetzen [. . .]
(I would sit down with the drug enforcement agents)
---
Team B: ---
Man muß nicht diesen Zehn-Jahreszyklich durchmachen wie
die 3 FDA bis zu neuen Arzneimitteln.
(You don’t have to go through this ten-year thycle like
the 3 FDA until [you have] new drugs)
Team C: Ich würde mich mit der FDA zusammensetzen [. . .]
(I would sit down with the FDA)
Man muß nicht unbedingt zehn Jahre lang 3 . . . Arzneimittel
prüfen
(You don’t necessarily have to 3 . . . test drugs for ten
years)
The interpreter in Team A seems to have succumbed to contextual priming

of the acronym ‘DEA’ (Drug Enforcement Agency’) which had come up
(twice) two questions earlier and nearly constitutes a phonetic minimal pair
with FDA. The mistranslation involving drug enforcement agents remains
uncorrected within a generally vague rendition that substitutes Perot’s
reference to clinical testing for FDA approval with notions like ‘the need to
find solutions’ and ‘moving faster to get to the people’. The interpreter in Team
B treats the first occurrence of the acronym by omission and subsequently opts
for retention in the original language, though not without revealing signs of
stress such as an uncorrected slip (anticipation) and a voiced hesitation before
‘FDA’. Conversely, the interpreter in Team C retains the acronym when it is
first mentioned but then, after a hesitation and a pause, decides to do without
any institutional reference.
These few examples from the corpus highlight the uneven distribution and
individual nature of the interpreters’ translational solutions for culture-specific
references. It is evident that there are differences among the three teams (as
established by quantification on the basis of rendition scores), but only a more
comprehensive qualitative analysis could help us identify patterns of strategy
use (e.g. omission, specification, generalisation or substitution) for individual
interpreters.
Conclusions
This paper has sought to investigate how media interpreters working in
high-stress conditions cope with culture-specific references in the source text,
which constitute an interesting test case for the analysis of interpreting

performance in a functionalist theoretical framework. Prompted by an explicit
statement of performance norms for the 1992 US presidential debate (Kurz,
1993), the empirical analysis has balanced an interest in corpus-wide
quantification against the need for a more richly contextualised examination
of qualitative data.
In line with the stated strategic goal of compressing and summing up in the
face of high delivery speed and information density, omission was found to be
the most frequent way of dealing with the culture-specific references (mainly
acronyms) singled out for closer examination. It is a moot point whether this
simply reflects an attempt by the interpreters to avoid cognitive overload or
whether omission is also used strategically to offer the target audience a
(more) comprehensible and meaningful text. The latter would amount to a
target-oriented strategy of cutting to communicate, implemented by omission,
generalisation and substitution. A prevalence of this strategic approach would
imply here that ‘culture is what gets lost in media interpreting’. While there is
some evidence of this in the present corpus, there are also counter-examples of
interpreters, even under high pressure, making an effort to render source-
culture-bound references accessible to the target-cultural audience (e.g. by
adopting the strategy of specification by completion), thus, and to however
limited an extent, communicating culture.
With evidence of both constraint-related coping behaviour and norm-
guided target-orientation, the present corpus of high-level media interpreting
performance leaves ample scope for more detailed analyses, with regard to
individual interpreting styles as well as the full range of culture-bound items
within the discursive context. Ultimately, the functionalist assumption that
interpreters seek to enhance the communicative effectiveness of their output
for the target-cultural audience suggests a need for empirical research on
actual audience perception. While such studies are largely lacking for
interpreting in general, they would seem all the more attractive and revealing
for media settings, where interpreters are particularly exposed in their task of
coping with and communicating culture.
Correspondence
Any correspondence should be directed to Franz Pöchhacker, Centre
for Translation Studies, University of Vienna, Gymnasiumstrasse 50, Vienna
A-1190, Austria (franz.poechhacker@univie.ac.at).
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Coping With Culture in Media Interpreting

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Coping with Culture in Media Interpreting

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Keywords: media interpreting, TV interpreting, culture-specific items,

0907-676X/07/02 123-20 $20.00/0 – 2007 F. Pöchhacker

with some necessary conceptual distinctions regarding media interpreting and

Interpreting in the Media

tions among users of simultaneous conference interpreting, she found

media. In terms of interaction constellation, these range from on-screen liaison

corpus-specific challenges and interpreters’ coping strategies.

Coping with Culture

Figure 1 Multilevel analytical framework

continuum as well as the interpreter’s verbal and paraverbal production (see

interpreters’ behaviour, the schematic visualisation offered in Figure 1 can

Function and ‘cultural transfer’

hand impression of a candidate’s personality and way of speaking, even

Norms and constraints

‘making the text functional within the target-cultural environment’ is clearly

‘culture-bound references’ or ‘culture bumps’ (Leppihalme, 1996) and

Culture-specific (or not)

nonverbal) communication is hardly distinct and separable from the rest of

addressed to the German-speaking television audience only, making this a

constrained format of the debate, the candidates resorted to well rehearsed

Culture in the corpus

(13%), including 10 instances of ‘Washington’. Reference to legislation and

differences between the averages for Team A (2459 25 syll./min.), Team B

Item Team A Team B Team C % score

Clinton’s complex reference to two individuals in Nashua, New Hamp-

Table 3 Rendition scores for 10 tokens of 6 acronyms (with pause-adjusted original

Item Orig. (speed) Team A Team B Team C % score

occurrences of ‘ABC’ and ‘PBS’, both in the moderator’s introductory

As indicated in Table 2, all interpreters omit Clinton’s reference to the

Perot: very unlike WWII when FDR’s sons flew missions,

Team B: Im Zweiten Weltkrieg haben die Söhne von F- Franklin

Team A: Wir haben die besten Forscher in unseren National Institutes

Perot: I would sit down with the FDA [ . . .]

The interpreter in Team A seems to have succumbed to contextual priming

which constitute an interesting test case for the analysis of interpreting

(pp. 154160). Binghamton, NY: SUNY.

Pöchhacker, F. (1995) Simultaneous interpreting: A functionalist perspective. Hermes.

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