The Interpreters' Newsletter n. 26 - 2021

Communication is vital in psychiatry, but it can be impaired when speakers do not share a language or lack language proficiency. The aim of this study is twofold: firstly, we examine how the interpreter’s presence has an impact on communication between psychiatrist and patient in a psychiatric consult; secondly, we explore the possibility to compare two different types of language mediation (in this case, a professional interpreter and Dutch as a foreign language to the patient) through the triangulation of data and analytic methods. In this respect, two psychiatric consultations were video-recorded. Additionally, a retrospective interview was conducted with the psychiatrist. The discursive data were analysed using conversation analysis focusing on turn design, question-answer sequences, and topic development, combined with quantitative elements (e.g. turn count) and the results from a thematic analysis of the interview transcription. The analysis revealed advantages and disadvantages in working with an interpreter and showed some discrepancies between the psychiatrist’s perceptions or expectations and what we found in the discursive data. We conclude that the combination of research methods provides valuable insights into psychiatric consultations with and without an interpreter

The human right to an interpreter for minority-language speakers in criminal proceedings is protected and provided for under European and Maltese law. This study considers whether the provision of interpreting has an impact on criminal trials in Malta. To answer this question, two lines of inquiry were followed in the three cases studied: firstly, on the particular communicative context, to understand contextual expectations vis-à-vis court interpreting and secondly, on the roles interpreters adopt in court. Ethnographic research was undertaken and data collected through observation during court hearings, recorded field notes and the transcribed audio recordings of three case studies. An interdisciplinary approach was adopted, through the use of elements from: 1) the law; 2) forensic linguistics; 3) interactional sociolinguistics; and 4) critical discourse analysis, which were applied in the analysis of collected data. The data show that interpreter action in court does not always meet specific contextual expectations i.e. the interpreter as a “conduit”, or as a “faithful renderer of utterances”, with a resulting impact on the context in both form and content. Other roles based on interpreter action may sometimes be observed, but difficulty was found in matching observed action with roles established in the literature.

This study aims to evaluate the methodological complementarity of the concepts of footing (Goffman 1981; Wadensjö 1998) and position (Davies/Harré 1990), to study the interactional dynamics of a bilingual, interpreter-mediated encounter. This double analytical lens is applied to four excerpts: two in mental health and two in court interpreting. The results show that the concept of position lends greater focus than if we limit our examination to footing alone. They highlight the participants’ constant and mutual influence in terms of the construction and negotiation of discursive projections, the shared responsibilities among all the participants regarding the different communicative perspectives adopted by the interpreter, as well as the specificities of the interaction at the interpersonal level. The proposed conceptual apparatus also reveals different relational dynamics between mental health and court settings. Applied to larger data sets, it could therefore contribute to determining whether there are interpersonal postural patterns that are typical of a given setting, which would feed into the debate on the interpreter’s role.

Despite the growing research in telephone interpreting, there are still few studies addressing it systematically from a linguistic point of view, since the work that has been carried out focuses on aspects related to quality, the satisfaction of those involved, the working conditions of interpreters and the skills they must possess in order to carry out training proposals. The aim of this piece of research is, based on the pragmatics of language, to analyse the prevalence and characteristics of face-threatening acts addressed to interpreters. Telephone conversations constitute an example of distance communication as opposed to face-to-face communication. Besides, interpreted interactions can be considered as indirect since the recipient does not receive the source speech but the translation of it after an interpreter has rendered it in the required language. According to literature, in distance and indirect communication there is a high prevalence of face-threatening acts (FTAs). It is thus hypothesised that telephone-interpreted conversations, as an example of distance indirect communication, will contain a high number of FTAs. The high prevalence and difficulties of FTAs for telephone interpreters have been already signalled but existing studies have analysed FTAs broadly, without making speakers and addressees a variable of analysis. In this paper, we focus on speech acts that threaten the face of interpreters and describe the most frequent ones in our study.

To prepare the ground for the French and English contributions to follow, the guest editors take stock, in both languages, of the thematic and methodological richness of dialogue interpreting (DI). They first illustrate the dynamism and innovativeness of the field, by presenting some of the topics that scholars in sign and spoken language interpreting have investigated, as well as the main methods of data collection and analysis they have used to address the complexity of DI. They then provide an overview of the eleven contributions to this issue of _The Interpreters’ Newsletter_, all of which open new thematic, theoretical and/or methodological directions of research. From an interdisciplinary perspective and on the basis of authentic data, the contributors explore particular communicative phenomena and/or develop specific lenses for DI, or shed light on practices that have so far received scant attention in the literature and in the classrooms. Finally, the editors point out other promising thematic and methodological avenues that do not appear in Issue 26, which is an invitation to take some time to reflect on the wide range of research and training possibilities that characterise DI.

The transient character of oral language obliges interpreting researchers to proceed to a transcription of recorded data for purposes of analysis. While transcription is essential to achieve a fine-grained linguistic analysis, its complexity has received scant attention so far in Interpreting Studies. In Public Service Interpreting for example, researchers mainly and usually opt for a vertical transcription format inherited from Conversation Analysis, regardless of their research objectives. Based on a reflexive transcription practice (Bucholtz 2000), this paper explores the use of a horizontal transcription format for qualitative empirical research in dialogue interpreting. It argues that horizontality, i.e. a format in which parallel columns are assigned to the speakers, first enhances the readability of the transcript. Moreover, it highlights both the dynamics inherent to the triadic interaction in the institutional setting and its interactional patterns through the modelisation of the sequences of turns-at-talk. Hence, it facilitates micro and macro linguistic analysis in an interactionist approach. The scientific assets of this method are demonstrated through the analysis of sequences from an authentic interpreted courtroom interaction.

This paper describes the operation and outcomes of the Promoting Equal Access to Services project, which had two aims. The first was to reduce the gap between training and work for sign language interpreters by offering a six-month structured internship, including placements in the Police and National Health Service, alongside mentoring, supervision and coaching. The second aim was to further the integration of interpreting into the institutional practice of the Police and National Health Service. The paper describes the background of the project and the organisationally-centred theoretical framework, based on the work of Dong (Dong 2016; Dong/Turner 2016) and Downie (2016), before outlining the support package offered and examining intern experience and the effects on each of the organisations, before discussing the relevance of the results for future similar projects and for the theorisation of interpreting. It concludes by arguing that, to ease the transition between interpreting and work and to create environments conducive to excellent interpreting, close co-operation between training providers and organisations that use interpreting regularly will be needed.

For a while now, interpreter-mediated talk has been analysed as a form of interaction under the lenses of approaches based on recorded and transcribed data. These studies converge on the idea that making sense of the participants’ contributions puts constraints on the interpreters’ activity, leading them to choices of action like explaining, clarifying, making explicit what is implicit. This paper focuses on sequences involving clinicians, migrant patients and intercultural mediators and deals with instances in which clinicians’ contributions heavily limit the interpreters’ choice of action. The cases in question are sequences where clinicians comment on patients’ different behaviour or habits. Our analysis looks at four types of mediators’ reaction that we found in the data, all showing the challenges these comments create for the mediators’ choice of action. We conclude that rendering is hardly an option and that while non-rendition may serve the purpose of protecting the patients from possibly offensive talk, it also hinders their involvement in the interaction, or their possibility of replying.

This paper addresses the specific communicative context of interpreter-mediated business-to-business (B2B) wine tasting events bringing together Italian wine producers and English-speaking buyers. Given the difficulty of obtaining authentic recordings of interactions in business contexts, the study examines the scripted dialogues that are used for role-play simulations in dialogue interpreting (DI) courses at the University of Trieste. These scripts were prepared by making use of authentic materials delivered to interpreters and gathered by the author of the paper while working as an interpreter at B2B wine tasting events. The investigation draws on the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation to answer the following research question: what are the argumentative features of interpreter-mediated wine tasting encounters? Focusing on the notions of dialectical profile, argumentative pattern and argumentative structure, the paper will show that, unlike other B2B encounters, wine tasting meetings do not generally entail actual negotiations between producers and buyers, but rather focus on the description, promotion and tasting of wine. They shape up as relatively informal meetings, which share features of business and tourist settings and in which the role of the interpreter is continuously negotiated.

Dialogue interpreting is a highly complex interactional process that requires close coordination of linguistic content and embodied semiotic resources between the participants. Such coordination greatly depends on how participants relate to the “ecology of action” (Mondada 2016), i.e. their immediate environment. In remote interpreting (RI), the reduced visual access or lack hereof makes that not all participants share the same visual ecology. This compromises the efficiency of using embodied resources such as gaze and gesture in turn-taking. As a result, common interactional issues, such as overlapping speech, can disrupt the communication and may even lead to communication breakdown (De Boe 2020). Yet, the ways in which turn-taking is managed multimodally in RI remains underexplored. Therefore, this paper investigates the effect of overlapping speech on the progressivity of the communication in face-to-face interpreting, telephone interpreting and video interpreting in three simulated doctor-patient consultations. With visual access between the interpreter and the primary participants ranging from no access (by telephone) to limited access (by video) and full access (face-to-face), these interpreting methods provide a fruitful ground to analyse the interplay between the different resources used for turn-taking. The analysis shows how the management of overlapping speech is determined by the specific ecologies of action and contributes to our knowledge of multimodal processes at work in RI.

The sudden shift from a traditional to a virtual classroom in the COVID-19 era has resulted in a radical re-organisation of courses not conceived initially as online learning. The Internet availability of materials and tools has been an excellent resource for the so-called “emergency remote teaching” (ERT); however, the passage was somewhat problematic. This paper presents our experience of teaching dialogue interpreting (DI) by distance mode in two beginner interpreter classrooms during the COVID-19 era. We present three different kinds of data: a questionnaire concerning our first ERT experience (2020), observation sheets, and two excerpts of transcriptions (made after recording the students’ role-play performances in 2021). Our aim is to analyse how ERT can affect course delivery and design and to evaluate whether the pedagogical measures we took to mitigate the drawbacks of ERT were effective. In essence, we were faced with the paradox of using distance learning methods for training students to work as dialogue interpreters in face-to-face interactions. Needless to say, some problematic aspects emerged during our lessons. Therefore, the present study is also intended to highlight strengths and weaknesses in teaching dialogic interpreting by remote.

Televised formats such as talk shows and news interviews often include foreign guests whose participation requires the services of interpreters. Several studies have illustrated how, in media interpreting settings, interpreters are active participants in the interaction, rather than simply ‘revoicing machines’. Most of these studies have concerned themselves with ‘infotainment’ shows, i.e. with a setting (usually) characterised by the physical presence of the interpreter, who becomes a ratified participant in the interaction. In this article, we wish instead to focus on the actions of interpreters in confrontational talk shows, i.e. media interpreting contexts characterised by the staged production of confrontation, where interpreting takes place off-camera in the simultaneous mode. Using examples from two Italian political talk shows featuring foreign guests, we show that also in this simultaneous interpreting context interpreters actively participate in conversational exchanges and are instrumental in the accomplishment of the confrontational practices which characterise such events.