Consecutive Interpreting and Its Many Facets The subject of this book is consecutive interpreting. An orphan among its translation peers, consecutive interpreting appears to have a short life and little if any luster. It also evokes little wonder: standing close to the every day and its dweller, consecutive interpreting invites us to take for granted both its existence and its meaning. In comparison to written translation and other types of interpreting, consecutive interpreting also spawns limited academic interest, producing exclusive empirical accounts which center on the interpreter’s performance and its indicators or, when tackled in abstraction, accuracy of linguistic reproduction and cross- comparisons of linguistic outcomes. It is extremely rare that the phenomenon itself would be isolated for academic scrutiny, especially so when it comes to a philosophical inquiry. This book seeks to redress this state of affairs by offering an interdisciplinary respecification of the phenomenon. The term ‘respecification’ points to the work of hermeneutic phenomenology, which seeks to recover the authentic sense of a phenomenon, its original identity, including the name that would be proper to the new identity, its constitutive specifics as well as its aesthetics and the ethical potential.1 Currently, consecutive interpreting appears under many guises, including such aliases as ‘oral,’ ‘liaison,’ ‘dialogue,’ ‘community,’ or ‘interlingual.’ In this book, I have chosen to present the subject of this investigation under the name ‘consecutive interpreting.’ In contrast to other modifiers that designate this type of interpreting, the word ‘consecutive’ is free from the misleading associations with a specific language medium or the inter preter’s mediating role. In contrast, ‘consecutive’ implies live interaction, pointing to the embeddedness of consecutive interpreting in communi cation which makes it immediately distinguishable from other types of interpreting as both a presence and a consequence. The connection of consecutive interpreting to the ordinary explains the use of phenomenology for this project. Originally designed to exam ine and challenge the natural attitude, phenomenology identifies this attitude with the human propensity to deproblematize the life-world by constructing it largely in functional terms, which emphasize ‘use,’ the preferred operation of mundane sociality. By employing phenomenology, we can examine the apparent ordinariness of consecutive interpreting in terms of its authentic rather than prescribed sense. Phenomenology distinguishes between the two because we often see the main purpose of consecutive interpreting in connecting us to a multitude of differ ent worlds and their inhabitants. On the basis of this assumption, we have little doubt that in order to understand and therefore relate to these worlds, they must be communicated to us. Among many forms of inter lingual communication, face-to-face communication stands out as the most effective tool of building an immediate bridge between different language communities. One of the most ordinary forms of interlingual communication, consecutive interpreting suggests a capacity of negotiat ing linguistic and cultural differences in situ, as we do by conversing with one another. At the same time, consecutive interpreting is not a phenom enon whose relation to human proximity means that it shall be easy to capture. Like speech itself, it ‘lives’ only as long as there is talk involved; after having marked its presence, it dissipates as quickly, apparently mak ing little if any difference to the social world at large. This ‘easy-to-see’ but ‘hard-to-get’ nature of consecutive interpreting points to yet another task this book is designed to undertake: in addition to recovering the authentic sense of the phenomenon, it seeks to establish the significance of this form of communication for the social realm. In performing both tasks, phenomenality of consecutive interpreting is not to be achieved experimentally or quantitatively in the fashion commonor social sciences, but, following the main phenomenological tenets, it must be discovered through the thick description and, as I am going to argue, be supplanted by the empirical analysis. The empirical connection is going to be carried out through those qualitative methods in com munication that are compatible with phenomenology, namely, ethno methodology and conversation analysis. With this orientation we arrive at the preliminary question for this study: How does one respecify con secutive interpreting? I suggest that in order to answer this question, we must focus on the following concepts: structure (eidos), purpose (telos), and origin (genesis). This book attends to all the three foci in a com prehensive phenomenological-empirical inquiry.2 Before launching this inquiry, however, I would like to describe various facets (manifestations) of consecutive interpreting, showing that in different capacities it indeed permeates our everyday life, making the phenomenon recognizable in its natural environment and therefore observable and describable. I call them ‘facets of translation,’ although it would be more apt to call them ‘faces’ since, from the mundane perspective, the activity of consecutive interpreting has but the front and is always embodied and thus enfaced. I must reiterate that the purpose of this introduction is only to show how translation, in general, and consecutive interpreting, in particular, constitute the fabric of our ordinary lives. At the same time, by showing different facets of consecutive interpreting, I will be priming it, as it were, for the subsequent focused investigations. A variety of ‘real-life’ examples of consecutive interpreting and a number of theoretical accounts will be utilized to this effect. If the existence of consecutive interpreting is beyond doubt, its sig nificance for the social world and its affairs remains obscure. At critical times, however, when the human ability of living together falls under question, when we begin to question our capacity of communicating with a cultural other, our familiarity with the phenomenon turns into an aspiration to know interpreting as the very thing that makes this kind of communication possible, promising crucial insights into different human worlds and their relations.3 This promise came particularly true for the current generation, which saw our subject in association with ideological, political, economic, and demographic crises that brought interpreting to the fore in the 1990s with a strongly critical emphasis.
