Fluency as faithfulness: A cognitive approach to an interpreting mega-corpus

Professional interpreters provide the highest quality and most instantaneous type of multilingual communication.

Across interpreting in spoken and signed languages, users evoke the notion of ‘fluency-as-fidelity’ when they engage with and evaluate interpreters. This notion is also applied to language learners and politicians.

This implies that fluency taps into a universal cognitive-evaluative mechanism that provides information about the speaker in communicative contexts.

Recent research on fluency has explored small corpora of interpreting and shown the value of the usage-based theory in connecting the social and cognitive underpinnings of fluency. However, prior studies fail to represent the multimodal context of interpreting and remain removed from end users.

The intersectional embedding of this notion and the process of explicating meanings in creating fluency often go unnoticed.

The project ‘Fluency As faITHfulness: A cognitive approach to an interpreting mega-corpus’ (FAITH) investigates the role of fluency in the production and perception of faithfulness.

The objective will be to explain how interpreters create (un)faithfulness using cognitive abilities such as chunking and construal.

It will do so by unifying existing interpreting corpora, comparing the production and perception of fluency in political interpreting, and empirically demonstrating the cognitive basis of explicitations in interpreting.

FAITH will contribute the first multimodal, intermodal and open-access interpreting corpus and implement for the first time multimodality and intersectionality in corpus-based interpreting studies.

It will provide answers to long-standing questions concerning the nature of the faithfulness norm, the explicitation ‘universal’ and language forms in interpreting.

Cumulatively, FAITH will further the EU priority of “Promoting European interests and values on the global stage” by enabling intercultural understanding between policymakers and diverse groups.