The Interpreters' Newsletter n. 23 - 2018

This paper analyzes accuracy in authentic telephone-interpreting data in which the migrant and the interpreter communicate in French as a lingua franca, namely a language that is not their first language. The data consists of an interview conducted by a law-enforcement officer in Finland. The analysis is based on the ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions of language theorized within systemic-functional grammar. The analysis shows that the particularities of both telephone-mediated interpreting and lingua-franca interpreting engender significant communication problems. As a result, accuracy is not achieved, and the interpreter has to use strategies that are questionable in terms of the codes of conduct of community and legal interpreters. The interpreter is an active agent in the co-construction, maintenance, and erasure of indexical meanings such as speaker identities. In addition, due to linguistic and contextual constraints, the interpreter takes a prominent role as a coordinator of turns. The paper suggests that interpreters’ deontological codes are based on monolithic language ideologies and unrealistic expectations that should be reconsidered to correspond to the specific features of lingua franca and telephone interpreting.

The present study aims at investigating the status of conflict zone interpreters. It sheds more light on the sufficiency of interpreting skills in conflict zones. To achieve the purpose of this study, the method employed is based on interviewing interpreters working for non-governmental organizations which provided humanitarian services for refugees in Jordan in 2017. The findings reveal that these interpreters lack adequate training relevant to this particular field of interpretation, hence encountering numerous (non)linguistic challenges. Finally, the study concludes that conflict zone interpreters are in need of a relevant model of training. Therefore, the researchers propose a competency model of training that may help them with the aim of producing plausible interpretations.

Issue 23 (2018) of The Interpreters’ Newsletter contains seven contributions covering various topics carefully selected from numerous papers presented at the International Conference Translation and Interpreting: Convergence, Contact, Interaction from 26th-28th May 2016, at the University of Trieste and hosted by The Translation and Interpreting Section of the Department of Legal, Language, Interpreting and Translation Studies (SSLMIT). From the various sessions on both Interpreting and Translation spanning across ethics, diplomacy, accessibility, law, politics, economics, medicine, television and more, the Organising and Scientific Committee selected papers for three distinct publications. Among contributions that focused exclusively or mainly on interpreting, the seven selected for the present 2018 issue of The Interpreters’ Newsletter cover three main themes: telephone interpreting; the use of comparable corpora in research or training; and interpreter training.

Telephone Interpreting (TI) is a long established professional practice, however there is a paucity of observational studies aimed at eliciting challenges and limitations as experienced by telephone interpreters, which could contribute to the development of effective interpreter education. There is a popular belief that training in dialogue interpreting can be applied to TI. The focus of this study is to gain an understanding of the specific features and situations that make TI trouble-free or challenging. We have elicited the various ways in which they have learned to grapple with difficult interactions over the years: from novices to advanced practitioners to seasoned interpreters. Responses from telephone interpreters from two different countries (Spain and Sweden) were also used to identify challenges that are culture-specific from the ones that seem to be universal. Our findings point to challenges that go far beyond the ones described in the TI literature, such as the lack of visual cues or complex and lengthy exchanges. Rather, navigating the client’s emotions, providers’ lack of awareness of interpreting needs and technical issues seem to be more central to an effective practice. The differences linked to levels of expertise and cultural backgrounds are analyzed and implications for training are extracted.

As a result of globalization and of the continuous developments of ICTs, spoken language travels through new devices and media. Similar trends can be observed in the field of spoken-language interpreting where, alongside traditional onsite interpreting, remote interpreting is spreading through the use of telephone and videoconferencing. Therefore, the need arises for updating existing theoretical models of oral discourse, interpreter-mediated communication and approaches to interpreter education. Against this backdrop, the SHIFT in Orality - Shaping the Interpreters of the Future and of Today Project was launched by a Consortium including four Higher Education Institutions providing interpreter training and two remote-interpreting service providers with the aim to develop a comprehensive pedagogical solution for the training of remote dialogue interpreters at HEI level and for Lifelong Learning. This paper presents the main features of the SHIFT Project, a Spanish-English-Italian 3-year Erasmus+ project, and some preliminary results, focusing on turn management in telephone interpreting between Spanish-Italian in service/tourism and English-Spanish in legal/police settings.

The aim of this paper is to explore the concept of comparability in corpus-based Interpreting Studies and, more in particular, the risk of using comparable components of parallel interpreting corpora. Quite a number of studies based on such an approach have yielded inconclusive results, which could be due, it is argued, to the fact that the comparable components are drawn from plenary sessions of the European Parliament (EP), in which the groups generating the data share a working environment and could therefore influence one another. To investigate the potential linguistic convergence that is likely to result from this mutual influence, both a theoretical and an empirical approach are taken. The theoretical approach seeks to determine whether EP interpreters and members of the EP could be analysed as constituting one single discourse community, according to the criteria put forward by Swales (1990). The empirical study of three discourse markers, based on data from a parallel corpus of EP interpreting and a comparable corpus of British parliamentary debates, aims to yield evidence of linguistic conversion.

Terminology research and domain knowledge acquisition constitute a substantial part of the preparation activity performed daily by professional and trainee interpreters. Corpus-based preparation can assist interpreters in investigating subject-related terminology as well as phraseology and in acquiring subject-specific knowledge. This is particularly important in light of the fact that interpreters often do not have the same level of linguistic and domain expertise as the other event participants. Since tools for corpus analysis have the potential to enhance the quality of preparation, it is reasonable to suggest that they should become an integral part of a modern interpreter’s workstation. This paper will introduce two kinds of corpora which can be used in interpreter practice and training in the context of deliberate practice. It will also describe the results of an empirical test of the resources created by a tool designed for this purpose in terms of their adequacy to be used during advance preparation.

This paper addresses the teaching of dialogue interpreting (DI) in healthcare settings. Based on the technique developed by Stokoe (2011a) – the Conversation Analytic Role-play Method (CARM), which was applied to healthcare interpreting by Niemants (2013, 2015), – the author replicates Niemants and Stokoe’s (2017) experiment within her English-Italian healthcare interpreting classroom, by adding the observation of real-life data to traditional role-playing. Data were collected within the Healthcare Interpreting Quality Corpus (HIQC) project, comprising both real-life data involving doctors, patients, and professional interpreters; and simulated interactions involving trainers and DI students. The first section of the paper is dedicated to the illustration of the methodological choices made during the real-life data selection process. It focuses on the real-life sub-corpus and recurring phenomena within it, which are discussed in relation to their relevance for DI training and their use in the classroom. The second part of the paper illustrates the results of the application of Niemants and Stokoe’s training method, the validity of which was verified during the examination sessions at the end of the DI course held by the author.