Bart Defrancq
Biographic Data
| ID | 1454214 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bart Defrancq |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bart |
| FAMILY NAME | Defrancq |
| SIGNATURE | DEFRANCQ B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ghent University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0296-0438 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 34 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Language mediation as a window into language ideological beliefs
Sham relationship investigations in Flanders (Belgium) are multi-phased institutional procedures comprising (i) a municipal phase at the civil registry office and (ii) a judicial phase at the police office. While language rights are supposedly guaranteed for applicants on the police level, where certified sworn interpreters are provided by the State, in the municipal phase, any type of interpreter, professional or non-professional, may be used. T…
Fundamental frequency as an acoustic mirror of interpreters’ cognitive states
The present study proposes the acoustic parameter of fundamental frequency (F0) as an alternative method for gauging interpreters’ cognitive load and fatigue during simultaneous interpreting (SI). The data collected from an English-Chinese SI experiment reported in Shao and Chai (2021) were re-analysed for the purposes of this study. Cognitive load was measured as the number of undelivered information chunks within the ear-voice span (EVS), where…
To repair or not to repair? Repairs and risk taking in video remote interpreting
The importance of video remote interpreting (VRI) for providing interpreting services has drastically increased over the last decade. Empirical research has shown, however, that interpreting through video link may have a significant impact on the interaction and the interpreting performance in dialogue interpreting contexts. The present study contributes to this growing field of research by focusing on interpreters’ repair initiations in the cont…
Interpreter-mediated access to the written record in police interviews
One of the main goals of the police interview is the drafting of a written record. That written record is the textual outcome of a complex negotiation process on the content and wording of what is being recorded. The interviewee’s ability to negotiate content and wording is however limited when the interviewee is denied access to the text of the record. Such access may be granted through the police officer’s reading out loud what he is typing whi…
Automatic speech recognition in the booth
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has been proposed as a means to enhance state-of-the-art computer-assisted interpreting (CAI) tools and to allow machine-learning techniques to enter the workflow of professional interpreters. In this article, we test the usefulness of real-time transcription with number highlighting of a source speech for simultaneous interpreting using InterpretBank ASR. The system’s precision is high (96%) and its latency low…
Former l’interprète et ses partenaires en milieu policier
Dans quel contexte intervient un interprète en milieu policier ? Je vais surtout vous parler de la situation belge, qui n’est cependant probablement pas très différente de la situation française. En effet, une directive européenne règlemente l’intervention des interprètes dans les procédures pénales : elle rend obligatoire l’assistance d’un interprète lorsqu’un suspect ne comprend pas la langue pratiquée par l’institution policière du pays où il …
Elicitation of particular grammatical structures in speeches for interpreting research
In many experiments with simultaneous interpreting (SI), researchers use source speeches that are not only written and read aloud, but also pre-recorded, reducing their ecological validity. This study proposes a method to obtain speeches that are suited for experimental research, but with lower levels of input control. It examines the effect of written cues in a PowerPoint presentation with varying constituent orders and varying ratios of explici…
Interpreting into an SOV Language
In Dutch and German subordinate clauses, the verb is generally placed after the clausal constituents (Subject-Object-Verb structure) thereby creating a middle field (or verbal brace). This makes interpreting from SOV into SVO languages particularly challenging as it requires further processing and feats of memory. It often requires interpreters to use specific strategies (for example, anticipation) (Lederer 1981; Liontou 2011). However, few studi…
Predictors of ear-voice span, a corpus-based study with special reference to sex
This paper reports on a study on Ear-Voice Span (EVS) carried out on corpus data drawn from the European Parliament Interpreting Corpus Ghent, where sex is included as a predictor alongside several other variables. Ear-Voice Span is considered to be an indicator of cognitive processes in simultaneous interpreting and has therefore been selected to determine whether potential cognitive sex differences trigger different EVS patterns in men and wome…
The cognitive load of interpreters in the European Parliament
Cognitive load is a major source of processing difficulties in both interpreting and monolingual speech. This article focuses on measurement of cognitive load by examining the occurrence rate of the disfluency uh(m) in two corpora of naturalistic language: the EPICG, with specific reference to Dutch interpretations of French source texts in the European Parliament; and the sub-corpus of non-interpreted parliamentary speeches from the Spoken Dutch…
Hedges in conference interpreting
This paper, part of a project on gender differences in simultaneous interpreting, analyzes possible gender-related trends in the use of hedges by professional interpreters and examines two hypotheses: (1) simultaneous interpretations, because of processing constraints, contain fewer hedges than the original speeches; (2) consistent with gender differences in spontaneous speech, women interpreters use more hedges than men. The research draws on Gh…
Interpreter-mediated “paternalistic” interaction in a judge-centered courtroom
This paper investigates an interpreter’s handling of a distinctive ‘paternalistic’ (following Tates et al. 2002 ) participation framework in a Belgian criminal court, whereby the defendant is the topic – but not the addressee – of the interaction. The hearing analysed, which was recorded and transcribed, was part of a drugs trial. An experienced court interpreter provided consecutive and whispered interpreting, almost always asymmetrically, so th…
Corpus-based translation studies
This paper provides an overview of state-of-the-art research in translation studies as represented in this special issue, with a special focus on corpus-based approaches that (re-)connect translation studies with other fields of corpus-based research in linguistics or which explore new types of translation data in the broadest possible sense of the term. It does so by singling out papers that illustrate different methods of data harvesting, on th…
Corpus-based research into the presumed effects of short EVS
The aim of this study, based on 32 French speeches simultaneously interpreted into Dutch at plenary sessions of the European Parliament in late 2008, was to ascertain whether short ear-voice span (EVS) affects the quality of the interpretation as is commonly stated in the literature. The speeches and interpretations were taken from the ‘EPIC Ghent’ corpus, which is in preparation at Ghent University. Three phenomena were identified as potential e…
Relevance verbs in English and French
This study deals with a particular group of predicates called “predicates/verbs of relevance” or “predicates/verbs of indifference” in the literature. Its purpose is to investigate to what extent verbs of this particular group present common structural properties. It therefore seeks to establish the structural manifestations of synonymy. These structural manifestations are not to be found in argument-function mapping à la Levin (1993), but rather…
Contingency hedges in Dutch, French and English
This article reports on a detailed corpus-based and contrastive analysis of the syntactic, semantic and functional properties of English depend , French dépendre and Dutch afhangen , liggen and zien as markers of intersubjectivity. Based on three large-scale monolingual corpora of spoken English, French and Dutch, the results show that these intersubjectivity markers are semantically related to a conditional meaning of the verbs they are based on…
Establishing cross-linguistic semantic relatedness through monolingual corpora
Each instance of language comparison requires observations on semantic equivalence. Meaning is by far the most popular tertium comparationis in contrastive and typological research. However, the question of how semantic equivalence is to be determined remains extremely difficult to solve. This paper presents an approach to detect semantic relatedness between a limited range of lexical items from different languages on the basis of monolingual dat…
Comme » devant l’attribut de l’objet
Cet article examine les structures à attribut de l’objet en comme et sans comme dans le cadre théorique de la grammaire constructionnelle. Il évalue, plus précisément, deux solutions qui ont été envisagées dans ce cadre pour rendre compte du problème de l’existence de structures minimalement différentes : la première analyse chacune des structures comme des constructions différentes ; la deuxième consiste à les considérer comme des instanciations…
Contrastive verb valency and conceptual structures in the verbal lexicon
The cognitive load of interpreters in the European Parliament
Cognitive load is a major source of processing difficulties in both interpreting and monolingual speech. This article focuses on measurement of cognitive load by examining the occurrence rate of the disfluency uh(m) in two corpora of naturalistic language: the EPICG, with specific reference to Dutch interpretations of French source texts in the European Parliament; and the sub-corpus of non-interpreted parliamentary speeches from the Spoken Dutch…
Corpus-based research into the presumed effects of short EVS
The aim of this study, based on 32 French speeches simultaneously interpreted into Dutch at plenary sessions of the European Parliament in late 2008, was to ascertain whether short ear-voice span (EVS) affects the quality of the interpretation as is commonly stated in the literature. The speeches and interpretations were taken from the ‘EPIC Ghent’ corpus, which is in preparation at Ghent University. Three phenomena were identified as potential e…
Hedges in conference interpreting
This paper, part of a project on gender differences in simultaneous interpreting, analyzes possible gender-related trends in the use of hedges by professional interpreters and examines two hypotheses: (1) simultaneous interpretations, because of processing constraints, contain fewer hedges than the original speeches; (2) consistent with gender differences in spontaneous speech, women interpreters use more hedges than men. The research draws on Gh…
Interpreting into an SOV Language
In Dutch and German subordinate clauses, the verb is generally placed after the clausal constituents (Subject-Object-Verb structure) thereby creating a middle field (or verbal brace). This makes interpreting from SOV into SVO languages particularly challenging as it requires further processing and feats of memory. It often requires interpreters to use specific strategies (for example, anticipation) (Lederer 1981; Liontou 2011). However, few studi…
Interpreter-mediated “paternalistic” interaction in a judge-centered courtroom
This paper investigates an interpreter’s handling of a distinctive ‘paternalistic’ (following Tates et al. 2002 ) participation framework in a Belgian criminal court, whereby the defendant is the topic – but not the addressee – of the interaction. The hearing analysed, which was recorded and transcribed, was part of a drugs trial. An experienced court interpreter provided consecutive and whispered interpreting, almost always asymmetrically, so th…
Contrastive verb valency and conceptual structures in the verbal lexicon
Establishing cross-linguistic semantic relatedness through monolingual corpora
Each instance of language comparison requires observations on semantic equivalence. Meaning is by far the most popular tertium comparationis in contrastive and typological research. However, the question of how semantic equivalence is to be determined remains extremely difficult to solve. This paper presents an approach to detect semantic relatedness between a limited range of lexical items from different languages on the basis of monolingual dat…
Comme » devant l’attribut de l’objet
Cet article examine les structures à attribut de l’objet en comme et sans comme dans le cadre théorique de la grammaire constructionnelle. Il évalue, plus précisément, deux solutions qui ont été envisagées dans ce cadre pour rendre compte du problème de l’existence de structures minimalement différentes : la première analyse chacune des structures comme des constructions différentes ; la deuxième consiste à les considérer comme des instanciations…
Contingency hedges in Dutch, French and English
This article reports on a detailed corpus-based and contrastive analysis of the syntactic, semantic and functional properties of English depend , French dépendre and Dutch afhangen , liggen and zien as markers of intersubjectivity. Based on three large-scale monolingual corpora of spoken English, French and Dutch, the results show that these intersubjectivity markers are semantically related to a conditional meaning of the verbs they are based on…
Relevance verbs in English and French
This study deals with a particular group of predicates called “predicates/verbs of relevance” or “predicates/verbs of indifference” in the literature. Its purpose is to investigate to what extent verbs of this particular group present common structural properties. It therefore seeks to establish the structural manifestations of synonymy. These structural manifestations are not to be found in argument-function mapping à la Levin (1993), but rather…
Corpus-based translation studies
This paper provides an overview of state-of-the-art research in translation studies as represented in this special issue, with a special focus on corpus-based approaches that (re-)connect translation studies with other fields of corpus-based research in linguistics or which explore new types of translation data in the broadest possible sense of the term. It does so by singling out papers that illustrate different methods of data harvesting, on th…
Corpus-based research into the presumed effects of short EVS
The aim of this study, based on 32 French speeches simultaneously interpreted into Dutch at plenary sessions of the European Parliament in late 2008, was to ascertain whether short ear-voice span (EVS) affects the quality of the interpretation as is commonly stated in the literature. The speeches and interpretations were taken from the ‘EPIC Ghent’ corpus, which is in preparation at Ghent University. Three phenomena were identified as potential e…
Hedges in conference interpreting
This paper, part of a project on gender differences in simultaneous interpreting, analyzes possible gender-related trends in the use of hedges by professional interpreters and examines two hypotheses: (1) simultaneous interpretations, because of processing constraints, contain fewer hedges than the original speeches; (2) consistent with gender differences in spontaneous speech, women interpreters use more hedges than men. The research draws on Gh…
Interpreter-mediated “paternalistic” interaction in a judge-centered courtroom
This paper investigates an interpreter’s handling of a distinctive ‘paternalistic’ (following Tates et al. 2002 ) participation framework in a Belgian criminal court, whereby the defendant is the topic – but not the addressee – of the interaction. The hearing analysed, which was recorded and transcribed, was part of a drugs trial. An experienced court interpreter provided consecutive and whispered interpreting, almost always asymmetrically, so th…
Predictors of ear-voice span, a corpus-based study with special reference to sex
This paper reports on a study on Ear-Voice Span (EVS) carried out on corpus data drawn from the European Parliament Interpreting Corpus Ghent, where sex is included as a predictor alongside several other variables. Ear-Voice Span is considered to be an indicator of cognitive processes in simultaneous interpreting and has therefore been selected to determine whether potential cognitive sex differences trigger different EVS patterns in men and wome…
The cognitive load of interpreters in the European Parliament
Cognitive load is a major source of processing difficulties in both interpreting and monolingual speech. This article focuses on measurement of cognitive load by examining the occurrence rate of the disfluency uh(m) in two corpora of naturalistic language: the EPICG, with specific reference to Dutch interpretations of French source texts in the European Parliament; and the sub-corpus of non-interpreted parliamentary speeches from the Spoken Dutch…
Interpreting into an SOV Language
In Dutch and German subordinate clauses, the verb is generally placed after the clausal constituents (Subject-Object-Verb structure) thereby creating a middle field (or verbal brace). This makes interpreting from SOV into SVO languages particularly challenging as it requires further processing and feats of memory. It often requires interpreters to use specific strategies (for example, anticipation) (Lederer 1981; Liontou 2011). However, few studi…
Elicitation of particular grammatical structures in speeches for interpreting research
In many experiments with simultaneous interpreting (SI), researchers use source speeches that are not only written and read aloud, but also pre-recorded, reducing their ecological validity. This study proposes a method to obtain speeches that are suited for experimental research, but with lower levels of input control. It examines the effect of written cues in a PowerPoint presentation with varying constituent orders and varying ratios of explici…
Automatic speech recognition in the booth
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has been proposed as a means to enhance state-of-the-art computer-assisted interpreting (CAI) tools and to allow machine-learning techniques to enter the workflow of professional interpreters. In this article, we test the usefulness of real-time transcription with number highlighting of a source speech for simultaneous interpreting using InterpretBank ASR. The system’s precision is high (96%) and its latency low…
Former l’interprète et ses partenaires en milieu policier
Dans quel contexte intervient un interprète en milieu policier ? Je vais surtout vous parler de la situation belge, qui n’est cependant probablement pas très différente de la situation française. En effet, une directive européenne règlemente l’intervention des interprètes dans les procédures pénales : elle rend obligatoire l’assistance d’un interprète lorsqu’un suspect ne comprend pas la langue pratiquée par l’institution policière du pays où il …
Interpreter-mediated access to the written record in police interviews
One of the main goals of the police interview is the drafting of a written record. That written record is the textual outcome of a complex negotiation process on the content and wording of what is being recorded. The interviewee’s ability to negotiate content and wording is however limited when the interviewee is denied access to the text of the record. Such access may be granted through the police officer’s reading out loud what he is typing whi…
To repair or not to repair? Repairs and risk taking in video remote interpreting
The importance of video remote interpreting (VRI) for providing interpreting services has drastically increased over the last decade. Empirical research has shown, however, that interpreting through video link may have a significant impact on the interaction and the interpreting performance in dialogue interpreting contexts. The present study contributes to this growing field of research by focusing on interpreters’ repair initiations in the cont…
Fundamental frequency as an acoustic mirror of interpreters’ cognitive states
The present study proposes the acoustic parameter of fundamental frequency (F0) as an alternative method for gauging interpreters’ cognitive load and fatigue during simultaneous interpreting (SI). The data collected from an English-Chinese SI experiment reported in Shao and Chai (2021) were re-analysed for the purposes of this study. Cognitive load was measured as the number of undelivered information chunks within the ear-voice span (EVS), where…
Language mediation as a window into language ideological beliefs
Sham relationship investigations in Flanders (Belgium) are multi-phased institutional procedures comprising (i) a municipal phase at the civil registry office and (ii) a judicial phase at the police office. While language rights are supposedly guaranteed for applicants on the police level, where certified sworn interpreters are provided by the State, in the municipal phase, any type of interpreter, professional or non-professional, may be used. T…
Computer Science (16 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Interpreting and Communication in Healthcare (13 works) · Linguistics (12 works) · Interpreter (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · linguistics and terminology studies (8 works) · Artificial Intelligence (7 works) · Natural language processing (7 works) · Natural Language Processing Techniques (7 works)