The Contribution of Non-verbal Communication for Effective Interpretation

Abstract

This study looks at the contributions of the non-verbal components of an oral text to its message and evaluates the extent of what is lost when an interpreted (target) text leaves out paralinguistic and other non-verbal aspects of the source text. The data was based on the Obama 2004 Democratic Convention Speech. The professional English-French interpreter interpreted from a video clip of the same address. The interpreted (target) text speech was transcribed. The two texts were subjected to a comparative analysis to identify the inaccuracies, the omissions and the paralinguistic features used in Obama’s speech as described by Leanne (2009) but left out in the French text that was produced by the interpreter. The speech was also categorized into key thematic areas in order to stress the fact they were better expressed through these features. The conceptual framework was based on the public communication concept of listenability developed in spoken public communication to parallel the notion of readability in written texts. The key findings revealed that there was a significant loss of the paralinguistic features used by Obama in the delivery of his message. Therefore, we concluded that this loss denies the audience that received Obama’s speech through interpretation a chance to fully appreciate his message. This could possibly have a negative impact on the expected feedback.