#Def elucidate how to#
To achieve a certain effect, such as a pleasant voice, one needs to learn how to vocalise, namely, how to use one’s voice or deploy the physical properties of one’s voice by means of a range of supralaryngeal and laryngeal activities, so that the impact or consequence from these supralaryngeal and laryngeal activities will lead to the intended effect. Depending on the way a speaker/interpreter uses their voice when vocalising, their voice may be heard as right/positive/pleasant, or wrong/negative/unpleasant. 1 Such an effect is recognised or judged from the perspective of a listener. In the current paper, I take the stance that the rightness or pleasantness of one’s voice is the effect, or impact, or consequence of the way of a speaker/interpreter using their voice properties. There have also been survey studies on how important interpreters’ pleasant voice is perceived by interpreters and interpreting service users, e.g., Bühler ( 1986), Kurz ( 1993), but relevant notion on pleasant voice is not available. 223) states that ‘ right voice leaves a positive voice image, while a wrong voice a negative one’, where the difference between what constitutes the ‘voice image’ and what leads to a ‘positive/negative’ voice image could have been spelt out. For example, in her paper ‘The speech behaviour of interpreters’, Horváth ( 2017, p. In literature related to interpreters’ voice, voice has been discussed more in terms of what is known as right/pleasant voice, without the two being explicitly distinguished from each other. 27), or the ‘individual or collective conceptions and attitudes’ expressed by the agents who are ‘involved in the long and often arduous translation process’, namely, those who ‘read and shape translations – authors, publishers, translators, editors, copy editors, critics, librarians, and “non-professional” readers’ (Alvstad et al., 2017, pp. ( 2017), where voice refers to ‘translators’ intervention’, as ‘an index of the Translator's discursive presence’ (Hermans, 1996, p. This concept of voice is therefore different from the also widely studied concept voice in Translation Studies, such as in Hermans ( 1996) and Alvstad et al. I use the term voice literally to refer to both the ‘sound produced by vertebrates by means of lungs, larynx, or syrinx, especially: sound so produced by human beings’ and the ‘expiration of air with the vocal cords drawn close so as to vibrate audibly’ (Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 2020 italics original). This paper seeks to define the concept voice for interpreter education and interpreting assessment for it to be practical and helpful for assessing whether or not an interpreting voice is pleasant. The paper goes on to discuss the potential benefits and implications of the newly proposed definition for both interpreter training and interpreting studies. The new definition consists of a cluster of suprasegmental features resulted from supralaryngeal and laryngeal activities and incorporates in what are traditionally known as fluency features in interpreting.
The paper employs an interdisciplinary approach to reviewing relevant literature and shows that for better interpreter education and interpreting assessment, there is a need to unravel, and unify existing understandings of the concept voice. The point of departure is that the concept voice for interpreting has to do with the physical properties of a speaker’s voice, which may lead to the effect that a speaker’s voice is heard as pleasant or unpleasant by a listener, depending on how a speaker uses or deploys these physical properties. This paper is an attempt to elucidate the concept of voice for interpreters in relation to the equally elusive concept pleasant voice for interpreters.
0 kommentar(er)
