The Interpreters' Newsletter n. 20 - 2015

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

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.

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 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.