Interpreting and orality in the historiography of mediation

Anthony Pym

Abstract

As a firm believer in the unity of the heard and the seen as complementary facets of language,
I am also a confirmed doubter when it comes to founding separate disciplines for interpreting (or
for audiovisual, cultural, signed, or any other form of mediated communication across languages).
It is all mediation, or translanguaging, or whatever superordinate suits.
In this paper I will tentatively refute the possible reasons for interpreter separatism, namely:
- ancestral anteriority
- the ephemeral nature of graphic records
- special cognitive constraints: time and access to resources
- special social constraints
- revenge of underdogs
- a ruling by the US Supreme Court.
This very act of refutation necessarily recognizes the presence of orality in the written, and of
the written in the interpreted. This should in itself indicate a way to address a recurrent social
problem with highly mediated communication, namely institutional boredom, especially in
institutional contexts. In highlighting translation as a communication act, the historical study of
interpreting can and should help all translation history see itself in terms of situated events.
Examples will be drawn from twelfth-century Hispania and twenty-first century EU
discourse.



The distinction established today between translating (written texts) and interpreting
(oral) is recent. It was the Renaissance which enthroned the book in our civilization. So
much so that the written word has supplanted the spoken word and translation has
come to be considered as a higher species and interpreting as an inferior active

Edmond Cary and S. Alexander. 1962. Prolegomena for the Establishment of a
General Theory of Translation Diogenes 10(40): 96-121.