SIGHT INTERPRETING/TRANSLATION

teaching at Bar-Ilan University, her efforts focused on two domains of interpreting in

community-based settings. Having taught in the Israeli Sign Language interpreting program
at Tel Aviv University as early as the mid-1990s, she managed, in the early 2000s, to launch
a SIGNED LANGUAGE INTERPRETING course at Beit Berl College, where she had founded
the translation program more than two decades earlier. In the area of healthcare inter-
preting, on the other hand, it took much more than course development to implement new
training initiatives. After she had organized the first ever national conference on access to
health care in 2005, years of determined networking in the unbroken tradition of Miriam the
social activist were required to set up a training course and interpreting service, including
TELEPHONE INTERPRETING, to facilitate access to medical care for Ethiopian, Chinese and
other immigrants.
Barely more visible to the international academic community than such training initiatives
to promote COMMUNITY INTERPRETING in Israel (Shlesinger 2007) was Miriam Shlesinger’s
dedicated work in editing publications by many translation and interpreting scholars –
as style editor of Target, and of many a book-length manuscript for the Benjamins Translation
Library series. Her appointment as editor of the journal INTERPRETING, from 2004, provided
fuller recognition of her selfless devotion to helping others get their work published in
impeccable style (see Shlesinger & Voinova 2013). Indeed, Miriam’s standards of excellence
as an author and editor convey the pleasure she took in language, whether spoken or written, in
a courtroom or a classroom, for its essential role in human communication.
Well-deserved distinctions for Miriam Shlesinger included an honorary doctorate from the
Copenhagen Business School in 2001 and the Danica Seleskovitch Prize in 2009, as well as
her appointment as the 2007 CETRA Chair Professor in the Translation Research Summer
School at KU Leuven, of which she remained an enthusiastic member of staff until shortly
before the fatal recurrence of her lung cancer in late 2012.
FRANZ PÖCHHACKER

SIGHT INTERPRETING/TRANSLATION
↑ MODES
→ SIMULTANEOUS WITH TEXT

Sight interpreting/translation is one of the basic MODES of interpreting. It is a hybrid form, in

that a written source text is turned into an oral – or signed – target text in another language in
real time. The interpreter is expected to render the contents of the written text, often without
time for even a cursory reading, at a consistent, fluent pace.
The term ‘sight translation’, generally used to identify this mode of interpreting in English
as well as various other languages (e.g. traduction à vue in French, traducción a la vista in
Spanish), is intrinsically inaccurate. Given the real-time processing demands, what is referred
to as sight translation is more aptly defined as a form of interpreting and has indeed long
been regarded as a form of SIMULTANEOUS INTERPRETING (e.g. Herbert 1952; Shiryaev 1979).
Therefore, the term ‘sight interpreting’ is much better suited to convey the essence of this
mode of interpreting (see also Čeňková 2010).
Sight interpreting is encountered in a wide range of SETTINGS and work situations. These
include meetings, often of a bilateral nature, which are usually conducted in consecutive
mode. Written documentation (e.g. annual reports, minutes) is then delivered in sight inter-
preting mode, either in full or in selected fragments. Sight interpreting is also frequently used
at press conferences, where statements or press releases may be delivered by an interpreter in

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a language which the audience understands. Other documents which lend themselves to sight
interpreting in conference settings include press reports which may be of interest to a meeting,
letters of apology for absence, or congratulations. Sight interpreting may also be used for
drafts prepared in one language to be submitted to a plenary or other body for completion.
In community-based institutional settings, sight interpreting may be required in back-
translating the written record of an interpreter-mediated interview in POLICE SETTINGS and
ASYLUM SETTINGS, for rendering expert witness statements in courtroom interpreting or for
medical reports and patient files in HEALTHCARE INTERPRETING. Sight interpreting is similarly also
used in SIGNED LANGUAGE INTERPRETING, a special example being that of a DEAF INTERPRETER
working from a teleprompter in MEDIA INTERPRETING.
In terms of cognitive processing, the interpreter working at sight rather than from auditory
input has the advantage of controlling his or her pace; on the other hand, sight interpreting
makes additional cognitive demands as the text is constantly before the interpreter’s eyes,
which increases the risk of lexical and syntactic INTERFERENCE. Despite these constraints, the
interpreter’s delivery is expected to be natural and without unnecessary corrections and
REPAIRS while maintaining eye contact with the listener(s) or user(s).
In interpreter EDUCATION, sight interpreting has been used in APTITUDE TESTING to determine
whether candidates are able to quickly grasp the essentials of a text and render its meaning
(see Russo 2011). Its use in interpreting PEDAGOGY, recommended and actual, varies in dif-
ferent schools. Training in sight interpreting often starts only once students master the basics of
CONSECUTIVE INTERPRETING and are thus able to render the message, as opposed to words, based
on their understanding and analysis of the source language text (e.g. Seleskovitch & Lederer
2002; Viaggio 1995; Weber 1990). Sight interpreting is generally considered a good exercise
for working up speed and thus for preparing students to undertake simultaneous interpreting
in the booth. When allowing for prior reading, sight interpreting is believed to improve
students’ ability to navigate in a text applying a non-linear approach and to identify core
information. In this respect, it is essential preparation for the composite skill of SIMULTANEOUS
WITH TEXT.
Sight interpreting has attracted relatively little research interest. Among the topics studied
are the type of information processing in sight interpreting compared to other modes (Viezzi
1989, 1990; Lambert 2004), and output-related constraints, given the high probability of
interference from the source text (e.g. Agrifoglio 2004; Gile 2009). In her PhD dissertation,
Jiménez Ivars (1999) undertakes a comprehensive descriptive analysis of sight interpreting
as a working mode and analyses the task in terms of the PACTE translation competence model.
More recent work has investigated ‘sight translation’ in the framework of translation
process research. In a small-scale experimental study, Dragsted and Gorm Hansen (2007)
compared the performance of translators and interpreters on a sight translation task and
found differences in behaviour regarding temporal variables and translational approach.
Translators paused more and took much longer to complete the task, and interpreters gave a
‘freer’ rendering, focusing less on individual words, as demonstrated by an EYE TRACKING
analysis. Eye tracking data (pupil size, fixations and regressions) were also employed by
Shreve, Lacruz and Angelone (2010) in an experimental study focusing on cognitive effort
and visual interference in a sight-interpreting task. Their results were in line with earlier
findings regarding interference from the continued visual presence of the source text, and
confirmed the cognitive complexity of the task, resulting from the need to cope with the high
lexical density and syntactic complexity of a written text under the demands of fluent oral
production.
IVANA ČEŇKOVÁ

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