The First Half of a Sentence

The German sentence first gets as far as a statement: it is one that a certain gentleman has requested. The action abgeben is located at the end of the sentence; the source language has not reached it yet. The French interpretation has already begun. It first says la déclaration, then uses a relative clause to attach the person who made the request. German compresses this relation into a modifier before the noun; French unfolds it as “the statement that a certain gentleman requested of me.” Neither side has yet completed the sentence, but the parts already spoken are not the same: one side is still leaving the action for later, while the other has already brought into the interpreted sentence the relation among the object, the person making the request, and the speaker. Once those French words have been uttered, they become the first half-sentence the audience has already heard; the elements that arrive later can only continue from it, not erase and rewrite the whole line as one might in a draft on paper. The sentence ending remains open, but the sentence beginning can no longer be freely withdrawn. That is precisely where the pressure of this continuation lies.

French then opens a construction that can be rendered as “I am already prepared to….” This is not a word-for-word translation of the whole sentence; it only makes visible the structure that had formed by that moment. The speaker is prepared to do something; the object involved in that action has already appeared earlier; the source-language action at the end of the sentence has still not been spoken. Hearing only this much, one still does not know what action will be taken, but one already knows what matter that action will fall upon, and also knows who requested this statement. The interpretation has not guessed abgeben, nor has it stopped to wait for it; it continues to take shape, having made clear a willingness to act while not yet connecting that action to the earlier statement. At this point, the French is not an empty shell waiting for a verb to be inserted: the noun has already been chosen, the modifying relation in German has already been reorganized into a French relative clause, and the construction of willingness has also been opened. In this corpus of two interpreters, the paper records this kind of handling the object first and then attaching the sentence-final verb as “structural anticipation”; there are only six cases in total, five of them from the same interpreter. This small and uneven distribution is enough only to let us look closely at the sentence before us, not enough to testify on behalf of all simultaneous interpreting. The example sentence and statistics recorded in the original paper can be found here.

After the source language reaches abgeben, the French continues with à la faire—to do it. The syntax is now complete. This step does not restate the name of the statement, nor does it replace the relation already formed with another formulation. It uses a pronoun to connect back to the noun already in place. The antecedent of la here is the sentence-initial la déclaration.