Gestural Alignment in Spoken Simultaneous Interpreting: A Mixed-Methods Approach

Cognitive and behavioral alignment plays a major role in simultaneous interpreting, the interpreter centrally monitoring and accommodating his/her behavior to that of the speaker-source. In parallel, the place of gesture in the interpreters’ practice, as well as its degree of convergence with respect to the gestures of the speaker-source, has been scarcely analyzed until very recently. The multimodal data for this study were collected under (quasi-)experimental conditions in a real court interpreting setting during spoken training exercises performed by two novice interpreters. In this exploratory study, the gestural performance of the interpreters, including their degree of gestural alignment towards the speaker-source, is analyzed and compared using a mixed-methods approach to a randomized sample of the recorded data. The analysis combines a basic descriptive quantification of body movements and a qualitative and comparative analysis of the gesture types performed by the speaker-source and the interpreters. The results show that, in spite of individual differences in interpreting fluency and gestural styles, both interpreters tend to align with the speaker-source’s gestural behavior in several ways, and thus a basic taxonomy of gestural convergence between the speaker-source and the interpreters is defined according to several criteria (mainly, gesture presence and gesture type). Our conclusions also allow us to formulate new research questions and hypotheses to be tested in future studies (e.g., types of gestures by the speaker-source that prompt a higher degree of alignment).