ABSTRACT
This chapter aims at describing how different semiotic modes are integrated to make meaning in conference speeches and what strategies interpreters use in recapping the multimodal meaning. To that end, a multimodal corpus of five professional interpreters’ Chinese–English interpretation of a 15-minute video-recorded conference speech is built. This chapter adopts a Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis approach to study the Intersemiotic Texture of the source speech and the meaning delivery strategies of the interpreters. Special emphasis is put on how ideational meaning is orchestrated and recapped. Findings suggest a complementary multimodal meaning-making strategy on the speakers’ side. While verbal language is still the dominant resource for meaning-making, visual input like PowerPoint slides mostly reinforces the realization of ideational meaning. This chapter also shows an overall trend of interpreters not verbalizing meaning carried by the visual modes through strategies of omission and compression. Rationale for the use of these strategies is also discussed in this chapter based on the result of the questionnaire survey and interviews with the recruited interpreters. This research contributes to the area of multimodal research in interpreting studies by offering a product-based discourse analysis angle to unveil the dynamics of multimodal processing in simultaneous interpreting.
