EXPRESSING NEGATIVITY IN SPEECH AND GESTURES OF SI-ERS

Abstract

The article elaborates on the role of negative language triggers for the highly demanding cognitive activity of simultaneous interpreting. Presumably, maintenance, omission or neutralization of negative information expresses a conscious decision of an interpreter. This process is often accompanied by certain co-speech gestures whose kinetic features we also subjected to analysis in this study. The data were collected during an experiment with 16 interpreters (8 from German and 8 from English). The information was annotated in ELAN program with further tests run in the Jamovi software. The results suggest that negative triggers tend to break monotony of interpretation and make interpreters process information more accurately, which is more typical of experienced interpreters. Both categories of interpreters though get emotionally involved, which can be seen by the gestural kinetic features traditionally associated with negativity (away movement, downward movement, palm down orientation, rubbing movement, usage of both hands and gesture space increase). At the same time the predominant part of negative items in the source text was preserved by the interpreters, who also created a “negativity balance”, adding negativity and neutralizing it to equalize the general negativity rate. Important differences associated with the language of the source text were not observed. Thus, a conclusion can be made that negativity disrupts the mechanical character of interpretation making interpreters more aware of the text contents.