Text condensation in consecutive interpreting

On April 10th 1996 I defended a Ph.D. dissertation on the above topic at the Aarhus School of Business, Faculty of Modern Languages (Dam 1995). The following is a presentation of the main aspects of the dissertation. As opposed to the bulk of previous research on interpreting, which has mainly been dedicated to general theory formation, the main purpose of the present dissertation is to provide an empirical description of a specific interpreting phenomenon, namely text condensation, ie. target text manifested length reductions of a source text, as it occurs in the context of consecutive conference interpreting. An additional aim of the dissertation is to propose a framework for an empirical investigation of this phenomenon. The approach to the investigation is interdisciplinary insofar as the analyses are conducted by applying concepts and methods from disciplines other than interpreting. As the focus of the investigation is on the textual manifestation of the phenomenon under study, rather than on eg. process-related aspects, concepts and methods applied in the analyses mainly stem from the field of text linguistics. A particular source of inspiration was found in text linguistic studies dedicated to summarization and related phenomena, especially in Teun A. van Dijk’s theory of Macrostructures in discourse (eg. van Dijk 1980), which served as a theoretical frame of reference in some of the analyses, and Kjersti Fløttum’s doctoral dissertation on French school summaries (Fløttum 1989), which was a main source of methodological inspiration.