Gestural style of the interpreter impacts performance appraisal in public service settings

Monika Chwalczuk, Sofía García-Beyaert and Robert Balas
University of East Anglia | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona | Institute of Psychology Polish Academy of Sciences

Public service interpreting can involve high-stakes situations in which multimodal information is key. Interpreters often mimic speakers’ gestures, which is paradoxically associated both with lack of professionalism and with fostering social harmony. This study investigates whether an interpreter’s gestural style affects users’ perceptions of professionalism, trustworthiness, and skill. Fifty-seven experiment participants watched two twelve-minute videos of a simulated English–Turkish parent–teacher conference. In one video, the interpreter used extensive gestures; in the other, she kept her hands still. The raters responded to a twelve-item questionnaire on professionalism, trustworthiness, fluency, experience, and likability. Statistical inference reveals that interpreters who used spontaneous gestures and gesturally aligned with speakers received significantly more positive ratings. These results suggest that visual input, such as an interpreter’s gestural style, plays a crucial role in third-party experiences of interpreter performance.

Publication history

Date received: 29 August 2024

Date accepted: 6 August 2026

Table of contents

In contemporary approaches to interpreter-mediated communication, across modalities and settings, the relevance of embodied semiotic resources, such as eye gaze, facial expressions, and manual gestures is acknowledged as part of the interactional dynamics between interpreters and recipients of interpreting services. The study of visuospatial cues in interpreter-mediated exolingual interactions is gaining increasing attention (Davitti 2018). Multimodal corpora show gesture production as a crucial element in the set of semiotic resources used in dialogue interpreting (Vranjes and Brône 2021). Audiovisual data also reveal a vast idiosyncratic variability in interpreters’ gestural styles (Chwalczuk 2021). Yet, the way the gestural style of the interpreter impacts how their performance is perceived and received has not been subject to systematic analysis. The goal of this article is to investigate the extent to which the presence (or lack) of hand gestures produced by interpreters influences the appraisal of their performance in dialogue interpreting.

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement no. 847639. The CoGCIn Project (Cognitive Processes behind the Use of Gestures in Consecutive Dialogue Interpreting) was conducted by Dr. Monika Chwalczuk as the Principal Investigator and carried out at the Institute of Psychology, Polish Academy of Sciences.

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Address for correspondence

Monika Chwalczuk

School of Media, Language and Communication Studies

University of East Anglia

Norwich Research Park

Norwich NR4 7TJ

United Kingdom

[email protected]
ORCiD logo with linkhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-4548-8153

Co-author information

Sofía García-Beyaert
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
[email protected]
ORCiD logo with linkhttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-7485-7451
Robert Balas
Institute of Psychology, Polish Academy of Sciences
[email protected]
ORCiD logo with linkhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-1906-216X
 
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