With Voice and Hands: Iconic Gestures in Simultaneous Interpreting

Abstract

From an embodied perspective on cognition, representational gestures have been described as spontaneous creations that emerge from the production of mental images during processes of meaning construction. The aim of this paper is to explore the role played by these kinds of gestures in the processes of meaning construction of simultaneous interpreters. To this end, the relationships between the iconic gestures spontaneously made by four interpreters in the booth and the mental images they remembered having produced while simultaneously interpreting have been analyzed. The results provide convergent evidence on the link between the analyzed gestures and the mental images described by the participants, and allows for some hypotheses to be formulated about the origin and functions of the iconic gestures produced by interpreters during simultaneous interpreting.