Brain plasticity in interpreters

Brain plasticity in interpreters

Carlos Man Ospina Nova

Ph. D Education, M.A Linguistics, B.A Modern languages, B.A Psychology

Certified Translator and Interpreter

One of the professions with higher cognitive demands is that of the interpreter. Few jobs require so many skills being used simultaneously in front of an audience usually with vast knowledge about the topic in question. External issues such as sound quality, air freshness inside the booth, collaboration of the speaker in terms of having passed notes, slides or insights ahead of time regarding his presentation and booth visibility may complicate matters even more. This is a professional who puts his linguistic competence, mental skills and professional reputation to the test every time he renders his interpretation.

Certain parameters must be met by the interpreter and his team for his work to be considered reliable. Not all interpreters provide an assertive, faithful, precise and valid version of the speaker´s message. There are even audacious characters who dare to do this job without having any idea of what they are doing or saying as was the case with the sign language interpretation at Mandela´s funeral ceremony. A professional conference interpreter does not work alone, he works in conjunction with the sound and floor personnel who must do their best to provide him with the best sound, internet connection, booth visibility and booth isolation possible so that he can focus entirely on his work. Then when all these conditions are present and even in the absence of one or more, the professional interpreter begins to bridge the speaker with his audience.

But before approaching this simultaneity of tasks, a quick review of how most interpreters get the training and developed their interpretation skills should be considered. The interpreter is not made overnight, he makes himself an interpreter through a constant and detailed process that takes years and thousands of hours of study, self-improvement and hands-on practice. Evidence of this is the failure and oftentimes paralysis interpreting daredevils suffer when they get into the booth and panic when they turn on the microphone. Professional conference interpretation is the Olympic games of bilingual linguistic and cognitive performance on the go and under pressure.

Interpreters train themselves with different tactics and strategies. One of them is what we could call first-sight translation: the attempt to translate from the source language (SL) into the target language (TL) a written text he may find on a newspaper, sign, magazine or a spoken expression he hears on the radio, television or at a lecture. An exercise like this turns the interpreter into an avid learner always willing to look up and retain new words, idioms or expressions he can readily use next time he comes in contact with these language forms. The interpreter also “shadows” recorded lecturers or live television anchors in order to develop immediately understandable pronunciation, accent, intonation and pragmatic patterns. The interpreter is a keen reader and learner with an ever-growing cultural, academic and scientific knowledge who is not afraid of speaking in public and looks forward to being given the chance to do booth time.

Professional interpreters constantly work on the following 10 parameters (Collados, 2007) that may be used to evaluate the quality and usefulness of the interpretation rendered: Voice, Style, Diction, Fluency, Accent, Complete Transmission, Correct Transmission, Cohesion, Intonation and Terminology. The capitalization of these terms indicate the importance, seriousness and dedication interpretation novices should give them in order to progress professionally. Students and teachers of programs in modern languages or any other professional in this field will benefit tremendously from working under these guidelines when it comes to trying to acquire a native-like command of the language, not to mention the wittiness and sharp mental skills painstakingly earned along the way.

It is time now to enter the interpreter´s brain after it has been made clear what it takes to be considered a prestigious professional in this field. In general terms, the interpreter listens, conceptualizes and produces. Three major processes with subtasks or actions that take great attention, energy and endurance. Listening involves attention to meaning and accent and pronunciation recognition according to the linguistic dialect of the speaker. Conceptualization deals with understanding the message once there is enough redundancy in the interpreter´s brain as to clearly recognize the speaker´s intention and ideas and possibly correctly guess what is coming next, something occurring while auditory centers keep on working with more incoming speech. Production activates language centers in the brain in charge of articulation and monitoring his own speech against the parameters presented above. All of this while auditory, cortical, emotional and speech centers keep working. In other words, conference interpretation is a whole-brain array of activities demanding laser-like attention, full use of short-term and long-term memory resources in the brain, expedite linguistic competencies and fully-engaged and efficient cognitive skills.

The brain of an interpreter can nowadays be seen in action thanks to advances in imageology such as Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging). These devices allow for the spotting of brain areas activated in the interpreting process. The right hemisphere works with the understanding of non-verbal meanings and the processing of extra-linguistic elements. The left counterpart has decoding and encoding language functions at phonological, morpho-syntactic and lexical levels (Paradis, 1994).

Analyzing the different brain lobes in which the cerebrum is divided, we come to realize that professional interpreting is a superb display of neural activity at all levels (lobes) and in all directions (hemispheres). The Frontal lobe is one of the four major lobes of the cerebral cortex. It is located at the front of each cerebral hemisphere and contains most of the dopamine-sensitive neurons in the cerebral cortex. This system is associated with reward, attention, short-term memory tasks, planning, and motivation (Gran & Fabro, 1987). Interpreters´attention is always at its peak for extended periods of time, short-term memory is involved with the speech in the SL, planning areas are busy organizing the output to be rendered. If you look at the brain image of an interpreter, this area is literally “red hot” and clearly stands out. The Parietal lobe plays important roles in integrating sensory information from various senses involved while interpreting: seeing slides or other visual input used by the speaker, listening to the speaker, reading and writing notes as the speech is given. Although most speeches may be interpreted tentatively without any visual input, the handling of which is the main function of the Occipital lobe, it has been demonstrated that non-verbal aspects do influence simultaneous interpretation (collados, 2007), which implies that not looking at the speaker might hinder the faithfulness of the message interpreted and may end up in the failure to recognize the real intention of the speaker. The temporal lobe is obviously active in the Broca and wernicke´s areas with phonological and semantic processing. The limbic lobe in the inner central part of the brain deals with long-term memory processes and emotion, something crucial for interpreting into the TL. Finally the Insular cortex handles pain and other senses. Should the interpreting session become over-extended (that is more than 30 minutes), this area will definitely play its role and take its toll as well.

Having briefly gone over the interpreter´s brain, we should come to realize the kind of neural restructuring that must take place for this job to be done professionally. Since we are not born with the ready-made ability to interpret speeches or lectures with in-depth management of information, it is logical to think that the brain plasticity necessary for such a task winds up creating a mindset capable of handling language and other everyday life actions effectively and intelligently. Brain plasticity, also known as neuroplasticity or cortical remapping, is then a term applied to the brain's ability to change and adapt as a result of experience (Doidge, 2007). So why not start getting trained in this sense knowing that the mental benefits from these practices are so remarkable.

We are born with three times the number of brain cells we end up with when we are adults. Synapses, neuron connectivity among themselves and otherwise, allow for the degree of integration of impulses, spatial and temporal summation and filtering out of non-essential information. At birth, every neuron in the cerebral cortex has an estimated 2,500 synapses; when we are three, this number has multiplied by 5 to about 15,000 synapses per neuron. As an adult this amount becomes reduced to half that number, 7,500 synapses. This synaptic pruning may be explained with the “lose it or use it” popular expression that commonly reflects mental deterioration as people grow old. Neurons and connections used frequently develop stronger connections and those that are rarely or never used eventually die.

Scientists at the university college in London examined over a hundred bilingual individuals in order to know how knowing two languages affects the structure of the brain. The results show there is a positive modification in particular in the way information is processed by bilingual people. Learning and memory skills get boosted as well in this population, key elements of brain plasticity. Ellen Bialystok, at York University in Toronto, Canada, studied 450 patients with Alzheimer, half of which had spoken two languages in their lives. Active bilingual individuals tend to present symptoms of this disease 4 to 5 years later than monolinguals. Psychological science published an article in 2010 citing improved levels of concentration of bilingual children who are less prone to getting distracted in the presence of classroom interferences. Judith Kroll from the Language Science center at Penn State University affirms that when a bilingual person swaps languages the brain gets exercised allowing for better multi-tasking situations.

In summary, professional simultaneous interpreters come to develop neural plasticity in great detail as the result of their intensive training in language skills, extra-linguistic knowledge, physical and mental endurance and extraordinary cognitive skills involving split attention mastery, immediate planning, immediate short and long term memory retrieval; all at the same time and on the spot. No wonder professional interpreters are highly respected, admired and highly retributed for their work.

References

• Collados Aís, Á., Pradas Macías, E.M., Stévaux, E. & García Becerra, O. 2007. La evaluación de la calidad en Interpretación Simultánea: Parámetros de incidencia. Granada: Comares.

• Doidge, N. The Brain That Changes Itself, Appendix 2, p. 318.

• Doidge, N. The Brain That Changes Itself, Preface, p. xx.

• Gran, L. y Fabbro, F., 1987: “Cerebral lateralization in simultaneous interpretation”, en Across the Gap, Proceedings of the 28th Annual ATA Conference, K. Kummer (ed.). Learned Information Inc., Medford N.J, pp. 323-335. Citado en Falbo, C; Russo, M; Straniero, F.S. (Eds.), Interpretazione simultanea e consecutiva. Problema teorice e metodologie didattiche. Milano, Ulrico Hoepli, 1999.

• Paradis, M., 1994: “Towards a neurolinguistic theory of simultaneous translation: the framework”. International Journal of Psycholinguistics, 10, pp. 319-335.