The Interpreters' Newsletter n. 20 - 2015

Today most professional football teams are multilingual; at the same time, the increasing media exposure of this sport has led to a growing number of press conferences involving players and coaches with limited proficiency in the language of the country where they play. As a result, there is a niche market for interpreters in professional football. This paper presents a case study based on a small corpus of press conferences organised for the official presentation of new players: its aim is to describe communication dynamics, common practices and pitfalls and to discuss interpreter roles in such settings.

This paper studies the activity of lay interpreters (LI) in bilingual (Yucatec Maya and Spanish) medical consultations. It focuses in particular on the interpreter’s correction of responses that patients give to doctors. The occurrence of such correcting sequences reveals some trouble in the patient’s response to questions in Spanish, or in understanding the LI’s translation of the prior question. It also reveals the LI’s understanding of the doctor’s questions, as well as her/his orientation towards the production of the appropriate information needed to match such questions. Central in this study are cases in which the doctor seeks to quantify an undetermined value (related to time, intensity, frequency of a symptom or trouble). The analysis shows that the LIs intervene recurrently to specify the patients’ response to this type of question, pursuing a definite and translatable quantitative figure that could be delivered to the physician. Such practice also allows us to have access to the Lis’ local understanding of their specific role in the current activity. As such, this study contributes to shade light on this common yet controversial and still under-investigated type of community interpreting in healthcare. The data, which consist of a large corpus of video-recorded consultations, have been analysed with the methodological tools of conversation analysis.

This paper is about interpreter-mediated interactions in an Italian Support Centre assisting immigrants who need to comply with complicated bureaucratic procedures to obtain permits and apply for jobs. The paper analyses sequences including the social worker’s questions about the reason for the visit or the immigrant’s problem, the mediator’s translations and the immigrant’s answers. Although the mediator pursues immediate translations of the immigrants’ answers, in a number of cases immigrants show serious difficulties in explaining their problems. The mediator deals with these difficulties promoting expanded dyadic sequences with them, followed by translations for social workers. The analysed interpreter-mediated interactions highlight the significance of the mediating function of interpreting in promoting narratives of immigrants’ personal and social conditions.

This article examines two multi-party encounters involving dialogue interpreting. Participant observation was conducted in these mediated interactions between service providers and Chinese users. The analysis of field notes and transcripts reveals some challenges these complex situations can pose for the interpreter: translating, coordinating turn-taking, and managing exchanges that include both adults and children, or even bilingual participants. The conclusions discuss how the interpreter can ensure an equal balance of power among the participants.

2015

The paper investigates empathy in healthcare interpreting by suggesting a theoretical framework through which some of the rigidities and ambiguities of traditional role categories may be overcome. Methodologically, a trifocal model has been designed entailing: a close-up view at locally produced interactional moves in mediated professional-patient encounters recorded at family planning clinics; an intermediate view focusing on the mediators’ responses to a situational questionnaire; and a distance view of their tested individual dispositions. The interest of the analysis lies in the presentation of an innovative research model built on the core construct of empathy, and in the working hypotheses that may be derived from the interplay between its three in-built perspectives, rather than in the findings themselves which are hardly generalizable given the limited set of data under scrutiny.

The notion of the invisible interpreter, once – and for long – an uncontested principle, has recently started to be deconstructed in favour of the image of the interpreter as an active third party in the interaction. This study aims to contribute to this process through an analysis of interpreter visibility in a prison setting using a corpus of 19 interpreted interviews and pre-interview surveys. It describes the self-perceptions of non-professional interpreters and the expectations of interpreting users about the interpreter role, and contrasts these with actual behaviours during the interpreted event. Results indicate that these interpreters tend to perceive themselves as less visible than they in fact are and that interpreters’ visibility in actual interaction is negotiated by all parties through conversational acceptance and rejection mechanisms.

The problem of interpreting what is “behind the turns”, not explicitly said by participants in their utterances, has presented a dilemma in studies of dialogue interpreting, leading to controversies about how far interpreters should engage in dealing with implicit issues they know about, but which are not made clear by the interlocutors. In this paper, I analyse data where a guide and an interpreter present a group of tourists with locations where the history and tradition of local products are exhibited. In my data interpreters expand the guides’ presentation in their rendition, adding quite a lot of information they know about, but which has not been explicitly mentioned by the guide. I suggest that the notion of epistemics, developed in conversation analysis, may help explain the dynamics regulating the distribution of responsibilities of guides and interpreters in dealing with relevant contents and I conclude that rights and obligations to explicate what is behind the guides’ talk can largely be seen as a product of the interaction.

This contribution discusses the results of research on the treatment of emotions in interpreted-mediated interactions in healthcare settings, discussing examples of interpreters’ choices excluding or promoting the emotions of the patients in the interaction. The corpus consists of 40 Italian/Arabic interactions and 15 Italian/Chinese interactions. Analysis draws upon Conversation Analysis as well as on studies on Dialogue Interpreting and intercultural communication. Findings suggest that the activity of interpreters may prevent patients’ emotions from becoming relevant in the medical encounter, but also that interpreting may promote an emotion-sensitive healthcare, in the interest of a patient-centred model of inter-linguistic medicine.

In spite of a growing interest in the statute and role relating to legal interpreters (LIs) in research and practice, there still is no standard legal statute for LIs in Belgium. Subsequently, this paper aims to investigate how the "Scheepvaartpolitie" (The Waterway Police) – by definition a division that is confronted with multilingual issues in ports – and LIs cooperate in the legal district of Antwerp. The literature review and the preliminary phase of this research focus on the work environment of the police and the interpreters in this area. To gain an in-depth view of the way the Waterway Police and LIs work together, we have interviewed ten members of the Waterway Police and five legal interpreters who were trained at the KU Leuven, Antwerp campus (former Lessius UC). The answers and remarks of both parties have shown that there is indeed cooperation, but it does not always run that smoothly. According to the Waterway Police this is mainly due to the non-user-friendly registers that are used to recruit interpreters. According to the interpreters, there is a lack of adequate training for the police in interpretermediated encounters.

The interpreter’s activity in a courtroom bilingual context is of fundamental importance for understanding to be achieved between the participants of legal proceedings. Although the key position of the interpreter in any legal process results from legal provisions, his/her role as court interpreter is defined differently: interpreters are perceived as invisible persons in the courtroom, intermediaries in communication, experts of language and culture or visible and active partners in communication. This paper analyses what actual role is played by an interpreter in judicial interaction. For this reason two transcriptions of audio recorded criminal hearings involving interpreters in Austrian and Polish courts were subjected to Critical Discourse Analysis. The analysis showed that the appointed interpreters are independent and active participants of the interaction who also play roles unrelated to their professional role and change the course of the proceedings through their own interventions.

The article explores students’ views and thoughts on two distinct ways of training students in dialogue interpreting (DI) by looking at a combination of the more traditional method of face-to-face training (which utilises simulated real-life DI situations in a classroom environment) with a ‘semi remote’ method involving simultaneous-interpreting booths used for consecutive DI. At the University of Tampere, DI is a mandatory course for all students of translation and interpreting at BA level. On the basis of two semi-structured interviews with senior DI teachers and the author’s experience in teaching DI, a questionnaire was created and a survey conducted among DI students focusing on students’ views of practising DI in the booth alongside traditional in-classroom practice. The survey focused on learning (sub)skills involved in DI and on comparing the two training methods used in the course. The findings indicate that using in-booth practice as an additional training method can actually serve students even better than DI teachers had initially expected.

This paper explores “impoliteness” in an authentic interpreter-mediated court examination. Drawing on Bousfield’s (2008) theoretical model of impoliteness, it describes the defendant’s verbal attacks towards the judge, the interpreter and incidentally the counsel, and examines the impact of the interpreter’s strategies on the dynamics and the direction of the interaction. The analysis reveals on the one hand that the interpreter regularly mitigates or omits intentional face attacks directed to the judge, which neutralizes their cumulative effect and results in the judge’s disempowerment. On the other hand, the interpreter seems to convey more accurately the offensive moves when they are directed to the defendant. Hence, the interpreter appears to be a pivotal element between primary speakers in the coordination of their face-work, the management of their power relations and their mutual positioning.