The Interpreters' Newsletter n. 22 - 2017

The use of corpus methods to study interpreter-mediated communicative situations has been increasing significantly over the last two decades. Curiously enough, due to a series of unplanned twists in my academic life in the last couple of years, I have found myself dealing with a considerable corpus of investigations based on this research paradigm. Part of these are included in the present issue of The Interpreters’ Newsletter.

This paper analyzes the general impact and the potentially adverse effects of the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) in a telephone-interpreted police interview in Finland, which was recorded and transcribed. The data were analyzed manually, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The analysis focuses on issues of mutual understanding and the organization of discursive flow from the interpreter’s perspective, using theoretical and methodological tools from conversation analysis, critical sociolinguistics, and critical discourse analysis. Examples of repair initiations and candidate understandings in the data, divided into three categories based on the degree of interpreter intervention in interaction, illustrate the interpreter’s prominent role as a coordinator of discursive flow and repairer of communication problems. However, while the ELF-speaking interpreter shows accommodation to the ELF-speaking migrant’s linguistic resources, the outcome is not necessarily beneficial to the migrant. The service provider’s command of English complicates the interaction. Thus, in dialogue interpreting, ELF may function as an instrument of linguistic unfairness in ways that are often unpredictable. The representations that the interpreter constructs of the other participants as persons with limited linguistic and discursive resources play an important role in such processes. The peculiar features of telephone interpreting intersecting with issues related to ELF intensify such phenomena.

Founded in 1988 as the first journal on Interpreting Studies, The Interpreters’ Newsletter publishes contributions covering theoretical and practical aspects of interpreting.

In cross-examination, witnesses’ face is frequently threatened by legal professionals. Face-threatening acts (Brown/Levinson 1987) are considered powerful institutional tools for lawyers; however, in a bilingual courtroom where all the interactions are mediated by a third party, the interpreter, this is often complicated. Drawing on a small-scale corpus, five bilingual moot court cross-examinations interpreted by Interpreting and Translation (I&T) Master’s students at UNSW Sydney, this paper investigates facework strategies embedded in cross-examining questions and in their Mandarin interpretation based on Penman’s (1990) facework schema. More specifically, it examines the way facework strategies are used in cross-examination questions, the extent to which they are maintained or modified in the interpretation, and how that may affect the pragmatics of the courtroom questions. The findings contribute to a better understanding of the pragmatics of interpreted courtroom questions and to legal interpreter training.

Healthcare interpreting, performed via tele/video-conference or face-to-face interactions is complex. Research in healthcare interpreting has contributed to our understanding of this practice (Metzger 1999; Davidson 2001; Angelelli 2004, 2011, 2012; Baraldi/Gavioli 2012; Meyer 2012). Access to cross-cultural/linguistic interactions between provider/ patient mediated by interpreters is essential to study intercultural/linguistic healthcare communication. Access to naturalistic data, however, is not always feasible. Therefore, researchers rely more and more on secondary data for analysis. This paper discusses ethical, practical and scientific dilemmas experienced when assessing the feasibility of turning ethnographic data into data for corpus studies. Firstly, after an introduction and a concise review of the principles underlying ethnography, the original studies are explained briefly to contextualize the data. These studies are: a) an ethnography (Spanish-English) of a medical interpreting unit and b) two case studies (Cantonese/Hmong-English) conducted in a total of three public hospitals in the United States. Secondly, a discussion on using data for a different purpose than the original one, and the resulting ethical, practical and scientific dilemmas will be presented. The goal is to reflect on and examine if the opportunities to advance science may outweigh the issues raised in this paper and if it would be ethical to proceed

Public Service Translation has for long been the ‘forgotten voice’ in PSI studies but it is arguably a valuable linguistic support for legal institutions and for training interpreters in the legal sector. Given that interpreters in the legal system in Italy often tend to ‘double-up’ as legal translators (to make a living) the line between the two is often hazy. Hybrid modalities like sight translation of legal and administrative documents is also a ‘borderline’ feature of these intertwined professions. The main aim of this paper is to describe how parallel and monolingual corpora can be used to train public service interpreters in double roles (translators, interpreters), namely by using corpora to translate, in multiple community languages. To this purpose, a computerized corpus has been constructed as a representative sample of learners’ renditions of legal texts. Then, other two corpora, monolingual and parallel corpora, have been used to verify the stumbling blocks dialogue interpreters struggle with, e.g. discourse markers and phraseological constructions. Corpus data are used descriptively (analyzing data) and prescriptively (providing examples of correct phraseological language usage in the languages at issue). In other words, I will describe how this methodology – through the collection of voice-recorded parallel corpora – is an invaluable tool in the training of legal (dialogue) interpreters. My ultimate aim is to provide concrete tools for legal interpreters and their trainers to facilitate their task primarily by constructing a multilingual parallel corpus as a resource for both academic research and PSIT practitioners.

Analysing both linguistic and non-linguistic strata in dialogue interpreting (DI) studies sheds new light on the dynamic interaction where meanings are also constructed both verbally and non-verbally. Most existing literature in DI has focused on linguistic description, calling for the need to explore interpretative and explanatory frontiers. DI between English and Chinese involves linguistic and cultural complexities; albeit they impose significant difficulties, these complications provide useful data for analysis beyond description as the multimodal semiotic resources of DI work in an integrated entirety. Underpinned by the stratification theory in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), we propose a multi-layer analytic framework (MAF) that integrates with the multimodal approach to DI, empowers the corpus techniques and enables DI researchers to investigate the ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions cross-modally, in particular when distant language pairs (such as English and Chinese) entail investigation into visual and contextual data. This article, though exploratory in nature, raises important methodological issues for future DI studies involving linguistically and culturally distant languages.