Albl Mikasa (2014) - The Imaginary Invalid. Conference Interpreters and English As A Lingua Franca

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International Journal of Applied Linguistics ◆ Vol. 24 ◆ No. 3 ◆ 2014
The imaginary invalid. Conference

interpreters and English as a lingua franca
Michaela Albl-Mikasa ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences
Institute of Translation and Interpreting
The critical attitude of conference interpreters towards English as a Lingua

Franca (ELF) has so far been downplayed by ELF researchers. This paper aims
at detailing the experience of professional conference interpreters in
interpreter-mediated ELF communication and argues that ELF research has a
stake in looking into their complaints because this may produce a better
understanding of a number of aspects of mediated and unmediated ELF
communication. Interpreter experience may thus contribute to achieving a
more comprehensive and balanced description of ELF.
Keywords: Conference interpreting, English as a lingua franca, interpreter-
mediated ELF communication, shared languages benefit
Die kritische Haltung von Konferenzdolmetschern gegenüber der weltweiten

Verbreitung von Englisch als Lingua Franca (ELF) stößt immer wieder auf
Skepsis bei ELF-Forschern. In diesem Beitrag geht es in der Auseinan-
dersetzung mit (interview- und fragebogenbasierten) Erfahrungsberichten
professioneller Konferenzdolmetscher zur gemittelten/gedolmetschten ELF-
Kommunikation darum, die Bedeutung herauszuarbeiten, die eine Analyse der
kritischen Dolmetscherstimmen für die ELF-Forschung haben könnte. Eine
solche Analyse hat das Potential, zu einem besseren Verständnis der gemittelten
wie ungemittelten ELF-Kommunikation und damit zu einer umfassenderen und
ausgewogeneren Beschreibung von ELF beizutragen.
Schlüsselwörter: Konferenzdolmetschen, Englisch als Lingua Franca, gemittelte
ELF-Kommunikation, shared languages benefit
Introduction
Conference interpreters are highly critical of the spread of English as a lingua

franca (ELF), or, more specifically, of the speech output of a growing number
of non-native English speaking participants at conferences (cf. Albl-Mikasa
2010; Reithofer 2010). It has been argued (by Kurt Kohn and Barbara
Seidlhofer in personal communication, among others) that their complaints
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd doi: 10.1111/ijal.12076

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294 ◆ Michaela Albl-Mikasa
can be regarded as unfounded because they are theoretically uninformed

episodic impressions and an expression of irritation in the face of:
• ELF being a new phenomenon people are simply not used to yet
(interpreters, in particular, are exclusively trained in and biased towards
the native speaker standard);
• the prevailing popular prejudice or “standard English ideology,” kept in
place by vested ELT (English Language Teaching) interest groups (cf.
Jenkins 2007: 32);
• a psychological unease arising from worsening business prospects for the
interpreting profession in times of ELF.
It is true, in fact, that, on the present scale, ELF is a recent phenomenon,

the implications of which have only been brought to the surface by academic
research since the 1990s (cf. Jenkins, Cogo and Dewey 2011). It is also true
that there is at least a theoretical mutual exclusiveness of ELF and
interpreting, in that interpreters are not needed where people use ELF, so
that existential fears are not far-fetched. As pointed out in my interview
corpus (see below), interpreters do not see themselves as an endangered
species (cf. Albl-Mikasa 2010), but they have reason to be concerned because
“interpreting is something people are no longer prepared to pay for,
whereas some time ago it was something that lent an international aura to
their dealings” (I-2). Finally, it must be conceded that interpreters, in their
capacity as communication experts and language enthusiasts, can take a
rather purist attitude towards language and have a Standard English
orientation. In my 2010 survey (see below), 53% of the respondents reported
to strive to be as native-like as possible and another 25% made it a point to
aim at maintaining a solid B (i.e., “perfect command,” AIIC 2010: 19)
language level (cf. Albl-Mikasa 2010: 131).
Does this mean that interpreter complaints are unjustified, or merely a
highly subjective view of a malaise that is non-existent or irrelevant to the
study of ELF? Or have they simply not yet been taken into consideration by
the newly established discipline of ELF research, which has made headway
since the 1990s (cf., Jenkins et al. 2011). This line of research has so far
concentrated on unmediated ELF communication; in fact, it has taken up the
interface between translation and ELF as an object of study only very recently
(cf. Cook 2012; Mauranen 2012: 239–43, House 2013). The reason for this is that
ELF scholars have pursued an emancipatory effort to overcome the deficit
view of the EFL (English as a Foreign Language) paradigm, which holds that
the English of the majority of the world’s English speakers is merely an
imperfect form of the native speaker gold standard. From an ELF perspective,
the native speaker target model is understood to be not only an unattainable,
but also an unnecessary goal. The focus has, therefore, shifted from
correctness to appropriateness. Corpus-based findings from this research
stress the effectiveness of ELF communication on the basis of ELF speakers’
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Conference interpreters and English as a lingua franca ◆ 295
creative appropriation of the linguistic means of expression for their

communicative purposes (cf. Jenkins et al. 2011, Mauranen 2012, Seidlhofer
2011). The bottom line of ELF research is that “ELF is not a defective, but a
fully functional means of communication, and that the arguments put forward
against ELF come close to an appeal for an outdated prescriptive English
native norm” (House 2013: 286).
This is clearly a view interpreters would not subscribe to because it runs
counter to their everyday experience. Their complaints and reservations have
been taken up by analysts in the field of interpreting studies. With a focus on
interpreter-mediated ELF communication, they have pursued different goals
and placed different emphasis than ELF analysts. However, these research
efforts are of an even more recent nature than those on unmediated ELF
communication, so that empirical evidence is as yet scarce and not very
robust. This paper seeks to bring together results produced so far regarding
ELF communication from an interpreter-based angle.
Taking this perspective is relevant in so far as interpreters are most directly
confronted with the spread of ELF. Although one would expect the use of
interpreting services at events such as conference settings to exclude that of a
lingua franca, the global spread of ELF has actually led to a situation where
speakers and presenters increasingly speak non-native English in such
situations. As a result, today’s international conferences are quite different from
the international multilingual, simultaneously translated conferences of the
20th Century, where individual language booths were provided for the full
range of participant languages (cf. Albl-Mikasa 2010: 129). In today’s ‘ELF
conferences,’ it is almost taken for granted that most people speak (non-native)
English and are understood by part of the (often non-native English) audience.
Interpretation is, therefore, typically offered for English and a highly limited
number of languages, often only one, i.e. the national language of the host
country. English at today’s conferences is, thus, increasingly used as a lingua
franca (because the other conference participants are not familiar with the
speakers’ L1s and interpretation is or cannot be offered for those L1s) and
topped up with some interpretation services (e.g. for German or Spanish, when
the conference is held in Germany or Spain, respectively). Against this
background and Mortensen’s (2013: 36) simple definition of ELF as “the use of
English in a lingua franca language scenario,” the term ‘ELF speaker’ is used
throughout this paper for the non-native English source speech producers in
multilingual conference settings and the term ‘interpreter-mediated ELF
communication’ where these ELF speakers communicate not only directly but
also via interpretation in such settings. Also, in line with the specialist literature
(cf. Mauranen 2012), the term ‘native English speaker’ and, for all non-native
speakers of English, the term ‘ELF speaker’ is used.
Against this background, the paper argues that there are good reasons
why interpreters should perhaps not be dismissed as malades imaginaires.
Moreover, it suggests that there are not only intriguing points of contact
between ELF (research) and translation/interpreting (studies), as pointed out

by Cook (2012), but that interpreter-based research can make a contribution to

the study of unmediated ELF communication more generally and broaden the
scope of the academic discussion of ELF. The paper first outlines the
interpreters’ experience of ELF against the backdrop of their specific bilingual
and mediated processing conditions. It then goes on to discuss an interpreter-
informed and less optimistic view of ELF communication and possible
implications for the study of ELF.
The interpreters’ perspective and experience
The following account is based on two sets of data:
1. semi-structured in-depth interviews of 11 professional conference

interpreters; and
2. a questionnaire survey among 32 professional conference interpreters.
The first set of data draws on a 100,000 word corpus of semi-structured,

in-depth interviews with five female and six male interpreters, recruited (on
the basis of their availability) from the 32 respondents that had filled out the
earlier questionnaire in the survey described below. They all work as freelance
conference interpreters in the German-speaking market: one for the EU, three
for the EU and the private market, and the other seven in the private market;
three of them have a working experience of 30 plus years, two of 20 plus, and
the other six of about 15 years; nine have German as their A (native) language
and English as B (active) or C (passive) language, two have an English A
and a German B or C (and are the only ones not part of the questionnaire
cohort); nine of them are members of the AIIC (International Association of
Conference Interpreters). Each interview lasted for 60 to 70 minutes and their
word-for-word transcriptions (disregarding prosodic and other paralinguistic
features) ranged from 7,000 to 11,000 words each. They were coded and
referenced as I-1 to I-11. The main focus of the questions answered by the 11
interviewees was on interpreter competence, competence development, and
the impact of the increasing number of ELF speakers on interpreting. While
the results concerning interpreter competence were analyzed in detail in
Albl-Mikasa (2012), the following account concentrates on the interpreters’
reports regarding the question on ELF. This question explicitly asked for
implications and consequences of ELF for their work and how interpreters
could prepare for changing requirements induced by ELF.
The second set of data comprises a questionnaire survey among 21 female
(66%) and 11 male (34%) professional conference interpreters; 28 (88%) of
whom are members of the AIIC. They have worked as interpreters for
between 10 and 40 years, or 21.5 years on average. Most of them (84% or 27 in
absolute figures) have German as their mother tongue (all others are also
non-native speakers of English; they are Dutch, French, or Italian). All of them

have English as one of their working languages: 72% (23) have English as their
B (active) language; 28% (9) as their C (passive) language. 72% (23) have their
professional addresses in Germany, 28% (9) are Swiss-based. 72% (23) mainly
work in the private market; 9% (3) primarily with international organizations,
namely, the EU; 19% (6) work for both (2 of them are, in addition, partly
employed as in-house interpreters). The questionnaire contained 11 open-
ended questions on the implications of Global English on the interpreting
activity as well as the interpreters’ attitudes towards possible changes to their
profession. As the individual questions, quantitative break-down, and
comprehensive qualitative analysis are detailed in Albl-Mikasa (2010), the
questionnaire survey results feed into the following account only in those
parts where they help to complement the interview reports above.
With 32 questionnaire respondents and 11 interviewees, the following
account is limited in scope and provides primarily attitudinal and
orientational evidence. As far as primary data is concerned, it can draw only
on a small-scale pilot study, involving the transcripts of ELF presentations of
three ELF speakers and of the interpretations by one student interpreter as
well as retrospective interviews with the speakers and the interpreter (cf.
Albl-Mikasa 2013b). The following is, thus, limited to providing further
insights into the impact of ELF on interpreting, the investigation of which is
still in an exploratory stage. The main focus is on the reported problems as
perceived by the interpreters in the interviews and detailed as ‘the shared
languages issue,’ ‘the different variety issue,’ and ‘the cognitive load issue.’
The shared languages issue and a need for interpreters with

speakers’ L1(s) as part of their working languages
Non-native speech is most easily associated with problems related to foreign

accents and unfamiliar pronunciation. What the interpreters in the interview
study point out is that pronunciation is an issue (e.g. a speaker may say
“merrily” instead of merely, I-2), but only part of the overall problem. The
greater difficulty resides in the practice of non-native speakers transcoding
(i.e., translate literally) idiomatic phrases, collocation patterns, and other
multi-unit structures of their mother tongue into English. Research into
bilingualism has, in fact, produced ‘strong evidence’ that there is substantive
L1-based transfer at least in the beginning and intermediate stages of L2
learning and use and that, up to a certain proficiency level, non-native
speakers are likely to think in their L1 and translate their meaning intentions
from L1 thought into L2 speech (cf. Pavlenko 2005: 438, 446). However, while
the impact of non-native accents on interpreting has been the object of
research (cf., for instance, McAllister 2000; Kurz 2008; Cheung 2013), this is
much less the case with regard to L1 transcoding. Interpreters, in the
interviews, complain about the literal English translation of such typical L1

structures (e.g. it will be sinful to from German ‘sinnvoll’ meaning ‘make good
sense/useful’; or this is not the yellow of the egg from German ‘das Gelbe vom
Ei’ which means ‘brilliant’; or what’s your resonance from German ‘Resonanz’
for ‘reaction’ or ‘feedback’; or escaped profits from German ‘entgangene
Gewinne’ for ‘lost profits,’ I-6) and the great number of interferences and false
friends (e.g. be short and pregnant from German ‘prägnant’ meaning ‘concise/
succinct,’ I-7). They point out that an Italian talking about “voices” in the
context of accountancy will be properly understood only by an interpreter
who knows that in Italian ‘voce’ refers not only to ‘voice,’ but also to an item
on a balance sheet (I-4). In their observation, those interpreters who do not
have the ELF speaker’s mother tongue as one of their working languages may
be hard-pressed when they have to reconstruct the intended meaning; this
point is elaborated upon by Stähle (2009: 170).
A number of case studies have, in fact, confirmed that knowing the non-
native English speaker’s mother tongue (i.e., having it as one of one’s working
languages) greatly facilitates the interpreter’s task (e.g. Taylor 1989; Kurz and
Basel 2009). According to the report by one of Germany’s top conference
interpreter team organizers (in personal communication), they have, in fact,
come to take into account not only the conference languages, but also the
speakers’ L1s in contracting interpreters. For the interpreters, what I termed
the “shared languages benefit” (Albl-Mikasa 2013a: 105) is a fact of their
everyday working life and the (German speaking) interpreters in the
interviews felt strongly that colleagues having to interpret (German) ELF
speakers into European languages (other than German), but do not know
German, often had a very hard time.
The different variety issue and the need for separate English
and ELF booths
The interpreters interviewed report that an increasing number of ELF speakers

at conferences speak English, even if it is not necessary (e.g. when
interpretation is offered), because of a fashionable trend or because their boss
may require them to speak English (making it a point that “we can English,”
I-7). According to the interpreters, many of these presenters speak “what they
believe to be English” (I-2). Deviations from the standard are often such that the
“English” phrases are unrecognizable, unrecoverable, or “not digestible” (I-2)
for native English speakers in the audience. This is reported to lead to the
paradoxical situation where the very English native speakers to whom an ELF
speech is addressed are found to take to the earphones and turn to the
interpretation in a language they happen to be familiar with for want of
understanding the non-native English (I-6). In fact, in the observation of several
interpreters, a fair number of ELF speakers tend to misjudge or “overestimate”
(I-2) their command of the English language. “It sounds often washy as if the
speakers themselves were not sure of what they are talking about” (I-5).

Another observation is that native English conference participants feel

disadvantaged by not being offered the same comprehensible input as their
colleagues of other languages who are provided with professional
interpretation. One of the interpreters recounted that, in the context of a large
Europe-based multinational company, the native English speakers complained
about having to listen to the French managers’ original “franglais,” while their
colleagues could listen to interpretation in the “correct target language” (I-2).
The same interpreter reported that native English speakers can be particularly
hard pressed to understand ELF speakers and, in the EU context, often relied on
written documents rather than their speeches. In some cases they ran into
“serious misunderstandings” (I-2). The wrong use of “tenses” (e.g. the Irish
delegation asks for the floor instead of is asking), for instance, led to a situation
where the Irish delegate simply failed to understand that the chairman had
given him the floor. Another example affecting native English speakers and
ELF speakers is reported regarding the incorrect use of ‘if’ and ‘when’:
The Dutch all speak, nearly all speak very good English. But there [. . .] are
words which are false friends and things like ‘if we do this, then we do
this’; and then they say ‘when we do this.’ Totally different. And the person
on the other end is getting a completely wrong message. They think we are
gonna do it tomorrow, ‘when we do this,’ and they mean, ‘if we do it,’ and
vice versa. (I-11)
From the interpreters’ point of view, such impediments can undermine the
very purpose of successful communication for which such functions are
organized and may therefore be counterproductive. Theoretical definitions
not withstanding – earlier attempts in ELF research to set up ELF as a (ideally
codifiable) variety in its own right have given way to stressing the
heterogeneous, fragmented, and pluralistic nature of ELF, which is not
definable as a variety sui generis (cf. James 2005; Mortensen 2013) – interpreters
experience English and ELF as different varieties and have come to suggest
the installation of separate booths, an English and an ELF one. The advantage
would be two-fold: ‘ELF interpreters’ (preferably with the presenters’ L1 as
one of their working languages) could compensate for the calque-like
transcodings of idioms and other unconventional structures with which ELF
speakers confront their audiences, while ELF listeners would have less
difficulties with interpreters (in the English booth) who exploit their full
English repertoire of idiomatic expressions, collocations, and phrasal verbs.
The cognitive load issue and the need for three-strong

interpreter teams
The interpreters in the interviews and questionnaires point out that it often
takes more concentration and resources to figure out what ELF speakers

intend to say because “you have to think round the corner or even round two
corners to reconstruct what exactly they are getting at” (I-6) or in order “to be
able to discern what the speaker would have said, had he spoken proper
English” (I-5). A major problem is that difficult accents are often coupled with
incorrect use of lexical expressions: a reported example (I-6) was that of an
ELF speaker speaking of a “beer trap” (cf. Albl-Mikasa 2012: 77). What s/he was
actually trying to say was ‘bear trap.’ Not only did s/he get the pronunciation
wrong, s/he also used the wrong concept. ‘Bear trap’ is a technical stock
market term denoting an undesirable situation for short sellers (they get
trapped and are forced to cover their positions at high prices). What the
speaker was referring to, however, was some kind of mechanism that should
stop large-scale financial transactions beyond a certain threshold. In the
narrow time frame of simultaneous interpreting, such confusion makes it very
difficult for the interpreter to uncover the intended meaning.
The use of the wrong concept is, of course, not specific to ELF. However,
the interpreters report that the combination of imprecise labeling and
irregular usage of concepts with a foreign accent and unconventional
sentence structure can render their task much more difficult. Given
processing-related time constraints and capacity limits, interpreters’ scarce
resources are taxed by additional cognitive load needed to unravel
unconventional expressions and unorthodox structures and to make a
compensatory effort to get at the originally intended meaning of ELF
speakers. In fact, ELF speech is often experienced as requiring interpreters to
invest additional capacity into not only understanding but often construing
speaker intentions. Sometimes, guess-work on the part of the interpreters is
involved, for example, when the output of some Eastern European speakers is
reduced to a kind of foreigner talk (e.g. phrases such as “commission
proposal” instead of a full sentence make it hard to uncover, even in the given
context, whether a proposal was submitted, adopted, discussed, postponed,
and so forth). Or else, ELF speakers with poor command of the English
language tend to bring pre-produced manuscripts which they read off at high
pace, unaware of the propositional content: “at the European Patent Office you
get Polish or Macedonian speakers who read off their manuscript because
their English is so poor and they do so at great speed, because they get very
nervous” (I-2).
Interpreters make it explicit that their difficulties are naturally a function
of the ELF speakers’ proficiency level: “Speaking of non-native English
speakers as trouble spots, we are thinking, of course, not of those who speak
very good English, but those, whose deviating pronunciation, grammar, or
lexical choices affect comprehension” (I-1); “non-native English speakers are
a huge challenge, they range from the almost incomprehensible to the difficult
but comprehensible” (I-8). Proficiency levels have, indeed, been found to be a
major determining factor, in ELF research (e.g. James 2005, 139–40; Mauranen
2007) as well as in translation studies (Hewson 2009). Interpreters, more
specifically, stress the expression part of ELF speaker proficiency (cf.

Albl-Mikasa 2013a). In the questionnaire survey, they detail the reasons why
69% of them prefer to interpret the input of native English speakers in the
following way: their word flow; clearer, more logical and more differentiated
argumentation; deliberate and purposeful use of concepts and terms; more
natural way of putting things or ability to get their message across made it
easier for the interpreters to follow what speakers were getting at and allowed
for fundamental interpreter processes such as anticipation and inferencing
(Albl-Mikasa 2010: 135). From the interpreters’ perspective it is ELF speakers’
restricted “express-ability” (Albl-Mikasa 2013a) that affects their work.
As a result, the interpreters in the questionnaire survey stressed that, with
the increasing number of ELF speakers at conferences, their job had become
more strenuous and that this was one major reason for the decline in job
satisfaction (cf. Albl-Mikasa 2010). Consequently, they increasingly speculate
about ramifications for team composition, and, short of the installation of an
additional ELF booth, openly speak out in favor of teams of three interpreters
(rather than the usual two) to make up for the additional burden on their
resources.
To sum up, in the interviews and questionnaires, typical facets of present-
day professional interpreter life were reported to be the need to contract
interpreters not only in accordance with the official conference languages, but
in consideration of the native languages of the ELF speakers; the requirement
of an additional ‘ELF booth’ or for three-strong interpreter teams; the prospect
of the disappearance of interpretation from English (since everybody ‘knows’
English); and increasing job dissatisfaction due to adverse effects on the
interpreters’ cognitive processing. Even if these aspects emerge from
introspective studies, they can be taken as indices of the harder time
interpreters are having in the context of mediated ELF communication. As
mentioned above, their expressed unease is often downplayed, especially on
the part of ELF supporters. This raises the question as to whether the
difficulties reported by the interpreters are specific to their complex bilingual
task or whether they are also indicative of ELF communication problems in
non-interpreter-mediated settings and might justify a less optimistic account.
In support of the interpreters’ case
From an ELF perspective, one would argue that most of the reported
problems outlined above are restricted to the interpreting context and to the
special conditions of mediated communication and are therefore of exclusive
concern for conference interpreters. Indeed, ELF-induced interpreter
difficulties are directly related to bilingual and interpreter-mediated
processing conditions and task requirements specific to this specialized
activity: one major difference between mediated and non-mediated ELF
communication consists of the fact that it is not possible in conference settings
to rely on meaning negotiation or the co-construction potential typical of the

face-to-face interactions (such as group discussions, negotiations or business

meetings) analyzed in ELF studies. Interpreters “usually work in conference
settings with monologic speech events that offer little or no room for
interaction” and “cannot make use of the [. . .] let it pass principle as they
cannot allow themselves to leave long gaps in their delivery” (Reithofer 2010:
149).
In addition to the lack of such strategic interactional support, a major
problem in interpreter-mediated settings is the impact of ELF on actual
processing. The small case study described above suggests that a major
handicap arising from ELF speaker source text production may be that
unconventional ELF performance obstructs activation of established links
between source and target language items and of settled transfer routines, as
well as retrieval of ready-to-use translation equivalents (cf. Albl-Mikasa
2013b); according to the Principle of Encoding Specificity such activation
depends on a match of incoming items with previously encoded items (cf. van
Dijk & Kintsch 1983: 334). When the input is creatively appropriated English
usage, as is typical of ELF (cf. Seidlhofer 2009), there is a mismatch, which can
undermine activation of automated processes (as was, in fact, explicitly
pointed out by an interpreter in the questionnaire study, cf. Albl-Mikasa 2010:
137). This may be one explanation for why interpreters report their work has
become more strenuous in the face of the growing number of ELF speakers.
At this point, one could end the analysis by concluding that interpreters
have a point in complaining about the increasing number of non-native
English speakers at conferences, in that ELF-specific features may indeed
adversely affect their work, but that any such downside of ELF is specific to
the bilingual and mediated side of the interpreting task and its inherent
constraints. This could strengthen the assumption that, when leaving the
interpreter-mediated part aside, ELF is indeed “a fully functional means of
communication” (House 2013: 286) on the grounds that “ELF users mak[e]
effective strategic use of the language as a communicative resource”
(Seidlhofer 2011: 148). A superficial corollary to this reasoning might be that
ELF communication could effectively replace interpreting in many or most
settings. However, doubts on such reasoning are cast by interpreters’
observation that the problems they see attached to ELF are not limited to their
task, but that the restricted ability of ELF speakers to express what they intend
to say undermines communication in general, be it mediated or unmediated.
On the basis of their close and regular witnessing of ELF speakers’
interactions, they call into question one of ELF research’s fundamental tenets,
namely, that of successful ELF communication. This was expressed by one of
the interviewed interpreters in the following way:
ELF is good in one sense, in that it helps communication, but it’s quite bad
in other senses. One of the things [. . .] in the international context of
conferences is that you watch people, you listen to people
misunderstanding each other in English. You might have, say, a Dane

speaking to a Slovakian or something. And they’re saying, using words,

and you know as a native speaker that they’re understanding different
things. So it’s useful at a superficial level, but I think when you go a little
bit deeper, it’s quite dangerous [. . .]. At a very technical level, sometimes
it can work ok. Because all that matters are the technical details. But I think
when you get into more subtle subjects, then it doesn’t work. (I-11)
This view is supported by researchers in translation studies who have

expressed skepticism regarding evidence of effective ELF communication
because this is often based on conversation protocol data, which do not reflect
the level of terminological and special subject complexity typical of technical
conferences or of discussions geared at far-reaching decision taking (cf. Pöckl
2011: 530). A comparison of examples reported by the interpreters with data
from the VOICE corpus (www.univie.ac.at/voice/index.php) seems to
confirm this. It needs hardly any empirical testing to find that most of the
ELF-specific phenomena that have been earmarked, on the basis of ELF corpus
analyses, as manifestations of ELF users’ creative and successful exploitation of
their linguistic resources (e.g. Seidlhofer 2011: chap. 5 and 6), would not form
part of the interpreters’ complaints. Many of the non-conformities described
would be understood as ‘self-explanatory’ from an interpreter’s angle: the
phenomena listed, such as “repetition and paraphrase,” for instance, which
“serve the purpose of clarity and emphasis [. . .] with reformulations getting
more and more explicit” (Seidlhofer 2011: 100), would not affect interpreting
processes; on the contrary, redundancy and explicitness are welcomed by
interpreters because they release time pressures and cognitive loads. Similarly,
“regularized verb forms” such as conspirate, examinate, financiate, pronunciate
(Seidlhofer 2011: 102) would hardly trouble an interpreter as s/he is oriented
towards meaning rather than form. The same goes for the many examples
given under the header of “lexical innovations” such as increasement, bigness,
clearness, mutualness, unitedness, etc. (Seidlhofer 2011: 104); the interchangeable
use of the relative pronouns who and which (Seidlhofer 2011: 106); the
incongruent use of a singular demonstrative as premodifier of a plural noun
(this washing habits, this three trees, Seidlhofer 2011: 144); or the unconventional
or redundant use of prepositions (reject against, return back, discuss about,
answer to, Seidlhofer 2011: 145-146). None of these surface manifestations
that deviate from the native standard would raise an interpreter’s eyebrow or
cause any interpreting difficulties. They would be integrated into the
comprehension and transfer process from source to target language with
great ease. The same applies to “lexicogrammatical innovations” and other
pragmatic move-based ELF features presented by Cogo and Dewey (2006: 87)
as tokens of efficient communication.
What is more likely to make an interpreter think twice is the outcome of
what are described as ELF-specific idiomatizing and metaphorization
processes (e.g. they’re locking the wheels; the cream on of the cream, cf. Pitzl 2012:
43). These processes usually result in adapted structures that are heavily

cross-linguistically influenced by the speakers’ L1, as exemplified in the

VOICE corpus, e.g., don’t praise the day yet (Pitzl 2012: 45) from German
‘man soll den Tag nicht vor dem Abend loben’ (i.e., ‘don’t count your
chickens before they are hatched’). These ELF-research-based examples of
L1-transcoded variation of idiomatic expressions are more in line with the
examples reported by the interpreters (see above) and clearly underline the
significance of the shared languages benefit (outlined above). At the same time,
they, again, do not reflect the level of terminological and special subject
complexity interpreters are usually confronted with. The point interpreters
are trying to make is better illustrated by the following examples, provided by
I-6, of an ELF speaker’s explicit input and how it differs from what s/he
actually meant to say. Compared with a possible corresponding native speaker
version they illustrate how the ELF speaker version is a much greater
challenge not only to the interpreter’s comprehension task, but also to that of
the audience listening to the ELF speaker original.
authentic ELF underlying (German) possible native

speaker output L1 structure speaker version
escaped profits entgangene Gewinne loss in profit/lost

profits
offer the suitable entsprechende still offer the services
achievement extents Leistungsumfänge they need
furthermore weiterhin anbieten
possibility of der Anbieter kann provider has the
deselecting of the Leistungen option to give up
achievements to abwählen, zu deren certain services that
whose performance Erbringung er laut must normally be
the provider would Vertrag eigentlich provided under the
be ordinarily verpflichtet wäre contract
obliged on account
of the contract
An obvious hypothesis that can be derived from the discussion so far is that
examples of formal and lexical appropriation (often morphological deviations
from the standard norm, as described in Seidlhofer 2011 above) would
infringe upon ELF communication to a much lesser degree than L1 or
Lx-based transfer variation and that this would apply in similar measures to
interpreter-mediated as to unmediated settings. Another hypothesis could
follow from looking at it from a psycholinguistic angle. Rather than treating
idioms and metaphors as purely linguistic phenomena (“as a special set of the
larger category of words” and, as such, “cut off from the conceptual system,”
Kecskes and Papp 2000: 98), this wider perspective looks at “the process
through which conceptual knowledge is internalized and develops and how
this knowledge is, in turn, externalized in both social and cognitive activity

mediated through the L2” (Lantolf 2006: 102). From such a perspective,
surface manifestations of ELF-specific appropriation and idiomatizing may
appear to be “functionally appropriate and effective” (cf. Seidlhofer 2011: 120)
only on the basis of product-based (ELF) corpus analyses. Retrospective
questioning of the participants in the ELF communication settings, by
contrast, might find instead that they are less effective and less satisfactory
from the point of view of the interlocutors’ ability to express what they intend
to say, i.e. to cast into expression conceptual thought and propositional
meaning (see the psycholinguistic approach to express-ability in Albl-Mikasa
2013a). Consequently, what looks like successful communication in analyses
of transcribed data could be less so in the concrete setting of the wider,
authentic situation.
Less optimistic results supporting the interpreters’ view may, therefore,
emerge from more ethnographically oriented, on-the-ground research. For
instance, findings in a multinational company regarding business ELF point
out that mutual understanding between business partners is, at times,
possible only “on account of their shared repertoire, resulting from a
longstanding working relationship,” while “for outsiders, i.e., non-members
of this community, it is almost impossible to make sense of this conversation”
(Ehrenreich 2009: 142). Interestingly, Ehrenreich’s conclusion is in line with
the interpreters’ argument:
On the basis of my study, an optimistic conceptualization of ELF speakers as

‘highly proficient’ turns out to be a somewhat unjustified idealization.
Indeed sometimes, the speakers who participate in ELF events are
‘highly’ non-proficient speakers of English or, more generally, insecure
communicators, causing more or less visible communicative problems of
various kinds. This is a fact which should not be glossed over too quickly,
but which needs careful consideration in empirical as well as in theoretical
terms. (Ehrenreich 2009:145)
In fact, there are companies, who changed their corporate language

policy from English back to the national language (a case in point is Porsche,
which switched back to German, cf. Gentner 2008), because the use of ELF
did not support organizational communication and undermined operational
processes: “Whether a quality defect, an oversight, incorrect planning, or
mismanagement is concerned, the German engineer may only know the word
‘error’ in English, which does not allow him to bring out what he really wants
to say. In that way, most simple working processes fail” (Gentner 2008, my
translation). A similar step was taken by European Parliament’s Directorate-
General for Translation which set up an editing unit to ‘normalize’ ELF speaker
input, because it was vague, unclear, and ambiguous and could not serve as
source texts for translators of different target languages, at the risk of leading to
different versions of legally binding target texts (illustrated by Janet Pitt, EU
Director General for Translation, in a talk at ZHAW Zurich University of

Applied Sciences, Winterthur, Switzerland, 2 May 2013; see also Murphy 2013).
Finally, in the context of interpreter-mediated conferences, a larger-scale study
found that understanding of source speeches in conference settings can be
significantly higher among conference participants listening to the
interpretation into their mother tongue than those listening to the non-native
English original, even when they share the same technical background as the
ELF speaker (Reithofer 2010, 2013).
This suggests that examination of different contexts that challenge ELF
speakers, including (non-interpreter-mediated) technical conferences, may
qualify findings of successful ELF communication. It seems plausible to
assume that ELF speakers may be less successful wherever they cannot rely on
the jargon-like speech they have frequently used and rehearsed with familiar
interlocutors in a specific community or recurring context. They may cope
less well where discourse events, text types, or stylistic and rhetorical
requirements deviate from familiar communicative practices tried and tested
in established CofP (Community of Practice) frameworks and where
customary compensatory mechanisms do not take sufficient effect.
Against this backdrop, the views expounded by the interpreters, although
perceptions rather than factual evidence, bring to the fore a number of
interesting points, which have so far remained in the background and should
be taken up by empirical ELF research. The same can be said of similar
experiences in the domain of written ELF texts or translation. It is plausible to
assume that not all ELF utterances are troublesome only for interpreters or
translators because they cannot interact (most of the time) with the speakers or
text authors to clarify input meanings. Instead, a substantial number of these
utterances may also actually be highly critical in a non-mediated context. One
could even go so far as to suggest that interpreters and translators are uniquely
positioned to uncover ELF-specific communication difficulties and failures that
are not identified in corpus-based analyses and of which participants in ELF
settings are unaware. As Kaur (2011) points out, there are a number of
misunderstandings that pass undetected or unrepaired, even in dialogic
encounters. Unawareness of communication problems does not make such
communication effective and efficient. On the contrary, misunderstandings
may lead to detours, extra time spent, the requirement for follow-up meetings,
and, thus, additional cost (of various kinds) involved. Interpreters and
translators are prone to put their fingers on the problematic aspects of ELF
speech because they are trained for full comprehension and detailed meaning
recovery. Taking translational decisions requires them to process utterances
more deeply coupled with greater meta-discourse awareness (cf. Hewson 2009:
114). Moreover, their task does not allow them to gloss over deficient utterances
and make do with ‘let-it-pass’ (cf. Firth 1996), so that the potentially
problematic nature of such utterances is revealed in more detail.
Turning such a more critical, interpreter-informed eye on ELF
communication, therefore, challenges the dictum ‘as long as mutual
intelligibility is secured’ or ‘as long as the pragmatic and strategic means are

found to secure mutual intelligibility.’ As I-10 in the interview corpus put it:
“Language now tends to be reduced to a mere means to an end: ‘As long as
others understand what I mean to say.’ In this way, a most valuable dimension
of linguistic competence is lost – also in one’s mother tongue.” The reduction
of language to mutual intelligibility or of ELF speakers’ requirements to
simply “get the job done” (Björkman 2009: 225) ignores fundamental
dimensions of the use of language as outlined in detail by Mautner (1999:
192–93):
‘Getting by’ on a minimalist agenda could easily mean getting lost. In

more complex situations, and when success is more difficult to achieve, it
is no longer sufficient to get one’s meaning across ‘somehow’ and to get
only the gist of what the other person is saying. Instead communicative
competence is a much more sophisticated affair involving a variety of
skills which can be related to Halliday’s ideational, relational and textual
functions.
After a period of ELF corpus analyses with an emphasis on carving out the
strategic potential of participants in ELF communication and on the pragmatic
assets ELF speakers bring to bear on their interactions (cf. Jenkins et al. 2011;
Seidlhofer 2011), it may be time for ELF research to move on to consider
contexts where ELF may be less of a comfortable, beneficial, and supporting
resource. In fact, this would be in line with ongoing developments in revising
fundamental ideas about languages, language groups, and speakers, as well as
about communication (cf. Blommaert and Rampton 2011). Bringing together
people “with different backgrounds, resources and communicative scripts,
diversity is likely to pluralize indexical interpretation, introducing significant
limits to negotiability;” to throw up “some sharp empirical challenges to
traditional ideas about the achievability of mutual understanding and the
centrality of shared convention”; and to destabilize “assumptions of common
ground and the prospects for achieving inter-subjectivity” (Blommaert and
Rampton 2011: 6).
It is to this more critical view that interpreters testify. Rather than
dismissing their reservations about ELF as unfounded (see above), the main
question to address in the near future might be ‘when, how, and under what
conditions communication really works effectively and efficiently in specific
language contact scenarios’.
Conclusion
Conference interpreters, notorious for their complaints about the use of

English as a lingua franca (cf. Reithofer 2010), present non-native English
usage as disruptive rather than an example of effective communicative
behavior. Although the evidence assembled here is of an introspective nature

(based on a questionnaire survey and interview study), and despite the

obvious need for empirical investigations into the exact nature of interpreter
problems caused by ELF speakers, a number of indicators seem to suggest
that their critical attitude towards ELF may not be unwarranted and that they
should not be dismissed as an example of an imaginary invalid. Despite a
Standard English inclination, most interpreters would subscribe to a
difference-over-deficit view in Labov’s sense of the term and readily concede
that Standard English is not a prerequisite for successful communication or
(mutual) intelligibility (or undisturbed interpreting for that matter), unless
the deviations are such that matching source speech input with known
phrases becomes extremely difficult. Rather than correct, accurate, or native-
like source speech output, interpreters are looking for input (whether
standard or non-standard in form) that enables them to make sufficiently
reliable inferences about the intended meaning (cf. Albl-Mikasa 2013b).
The interpreters’ task is clearly affected by current ELF-related
developments pertaining to globalization (the effects are detailed above as (a)
the shared languages issue, (b) the different variety issue, and (c) the cognitive
load issue). At the same time, on the basis of their everyday experience,
interpreters maintain that it is not only their comprehension, transfer, and
production processes that are potentially impeded. They claim that the ELF
speakers’ restricted ability to make explicit exactly what they want to convey
and their insufficiency at carrying through their line of argumentation
(cf. Albl-Mikasa 2013a) poses problems to ELF communication in general,
regardless of interpreter-mediated processing conditions. As discussed
above, the interpreters’ position is not only arguable, but ELF researchers may
even find interpreters are a welcome test case because of their intense
confrontation with ELF usage. Due to their special processing conditions and
deep analysis of source utterances, interpreters cannot gloss over problematic
ELF utterances, but are predestined to pin down phenomena that might
otherwise go unnoticed. Against this background, it is suggested that it is time
to redirect research efforts to the investigation of the relative effectiveness of
ELF communication in a wider range of interpreter-mediated and non-
mediated settings.
Moreover, consideration of the interpreters’ perspective may help to
inform a non-ideological, balanced view and model of ELF. On one hand,
there are positions in ELF research that depict ELF and EFL as “two entirely
different phenomena” and hold that “ELF is not the same as English as a
Native Language (ENL), and must therefore be ‘additionally acquired’ by
NSEs too” (Jenkins et al. 2011: 283); this will be seen, by the interpreters, as
running counter to their decades-long experience of coping with ELF without
additional training or tuition. On the other hand, interpreters would disagree
with views in translation studies that “to all intents and purposes, ‘ELF’
means ‘English,’ despite attempts to portray it as something different”
(Gazzola and Grin 2013: 97), since ELF clearly impinges upon their profession,
processing, and performance (cf. Albl-Mikasa 2010), to the extent that they

experience English and ELF as different varieties. From the interpreters’

angle, English and ELF are neither entirely different nor the same. To take
interpreter experience into account may be useful in forging a (less optimistic)
‘middle-way’ conceptualization of ELF.
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email: michaela.albl-mikasa@zhaw.ch [Received 13 June 2014]

Albl Mikasa (2014) - The Imaginary Invalid. Conference Interpreters and English As A Lingua Franca

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International Journal of Applied Linguistics ◆ Vol. 24 ◆ No. 3 ◆ 2014

The imaginary invalid. Conference

The critical attitude of conference interpreters towards English as a Lingua

Die kritische Haltung von Konferenzdolmetschern gegenüber der weltweiten

Conference interpreters are highly critical of the spread of English as a lingua

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd doi: 10.1111/ijal.12076

can be regarded as unfounded because they are theoretically uninformed

It is true, in fact, that, on the present scale, ELF is a recent phenomenon,

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

creative appropriation of the linguistic means of expression for their

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

by Cook (2012), but that interpreter-based research can make a contribution to

The interpreters’ perspective and experience

The following account is based on two sets of data:

1. semi-structured in-depth interviews of 11 professional conference

The first set of data draws on a 100,000 word corpus of semi-structured,

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

The shared languages issue and a need for interpreters with

Non-native speech is most easily associated with problems related to foreign

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

The interpreters interviewed report that an increasing number of ELF speakers

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Another observation is that native English conference participants feel

The cognitive load issue and the need for three-strong

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

In support of the interpreters’ case

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

face-to-face interactions (such as group discussions, negotiations or business

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

speaking to a Slovakian or something. And they’re saying, using words,

This view is supported by researchers in translation studies who have

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

cross-linguistically influenced by the speakers’ L1, as exemplified in the

authentic ELF underlying (German) possible native

escaped profits entgangene Gewinne loss in profit/lost

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

On the basis of my study, an optimistic conceptualization of ELF speakers as

In fact, there are companies, who changed their corporate language

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

‘Getting by’ on a minimalist agenda could easily mean getting lost. In

Conference interpreters, notorious for their complaints about the use of

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

(based on a questionnaire survey and interview study), and despite the

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

experience English and ELF as different varieties. From the interpreters’

AIIC (2010) Directory. Geneva: International Association of Conference Interpreters.

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Seidlhofer, B. (2009) Accommodation and the idiom principle in English as a lingua

email: michaela.albl-mikasa@zhaw.ch [Received 13 June 2014]

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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