Interpreting across Genres: Multiple Research Perspectives

With the emergence of English as a dominant language in the globalization of communicative practices, interpreting plays a major role worldwide in various interlinguistic/cultural settings over a myriad of domain-specific genres. This volume offers a collection of research papers on interpreting across a range of scenarios covering several language combinations with English. It offers multiple research perspectives encompassing diverse interpreting modes within both conference and public service settings, including new emerging areas in Interpreting Studies such as media, remote and sign language interpreting. Each chapter investigates a genre or subgenre associated with a specific field of discourse: business, literature, law, medicine, media, defence, politics, and sport. The variety of topics investigated is broad and the diversity of methodological approaches wide, offering insight into rhetorical, microlinguistic and terminological features, drawing upon text linguistics, discourse and conversation analysis, corpus linguistics and studies on quality.

This chapter reports on a project conducted to investigate the feasibility of providing remote signed language interpreting services through AVL in the legal system in the state of New South Wales (NSW), Australia. The project was commissioned by the NSW Department of Justice and Attorney General, with a view to informing policy about the provision of signed language interpreters in court remotely via video. Until 2010, no research had been conducted on signed language interpreting services provided through AVL for legal purposes. Given the high stakes involved in legal proceedings mediated through interpreters, it is imperative to analyse the effectiveness of remote signed language interpreting via AVL to conduct legal proceedings. Qualitative findings are provided that give an overview of the stakeholder perspectives of the effectiveness of AVL to enable signed language interpreter-mediated legal proceedings. Deaf and interpreter participants generally found that although there were no major issues, they were not entirely comfortable communicating via this medium and in particular there were pragmatic challenges. The chapter will inform spoken and signed language interpreter practitioners about issues to consider when interpreting remotely via video.

Interpreters in all settings, in all parts of the world, and throughout history have lamented the poor quality of the language they must deal with in source texts. This chapter will review some recent publications on interpreting quality criteria, user expectations, and the associated challenges facing interpreters in different settings (Kondo 2006; Peng 2006; Lee 2009; Ng 2009; Napier et al. 2009; Kent 2009). The constraints facing court interpreters in adversarial settings will be analyzed, particularly when interpreting from English to Spanish for immigrants who may have little or no formal education. A variety of solutions available to court interpreters will be explored within the context of prevailing professional standards in the United States.

This chapter describes the nature of interpreting in military/diplomatic contexts at the Italian Ministry of Defense (MoD) and it is particularly interested in the role played by genre in this context. In terms of diplomacy-level military discourse, we offer an overview of some important genres that are part of the job profile of MoD staff and freelance interpreters. Specifically, we focus on the “hyper-genre” (Giltrow & Stein 2009) of Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and some related texts, genres and situations, which are combined in various ways to form “genre chains” (Fairclough 2003). Our main hypothesis is that MoD professionals are involved in genre-building and propagation. This hypothesis is premised on the notion that genre and context awareness are crucial to interpreters’ success. On the basis of empirical data taken from semi-structured interviews with current and former MoD Translators/Interpreters, we argue that interpreters in a militarydiplomatic situation assume varying degrees of responsibilities in genre dissemination and recontextualization (Boyd & Monacelli 2010).

This chapter offers a descriptive focus on consecutive interpreting (CI) of interviews in English for an Italian-speaking audience at the annual Mantua Literature Festival in Italy. Introductory remarks on how this relates to more widely studied interpreting scenarios are followed by an overview of practical arrangements for CI at the Festival. Short extracts from interviews with authors are then examined, in each case comparing the English original with a transcription (and back-translation) of the Italian interpretation. A number of features are discussed (e.g. establishing a rapport with the audience, authors’ views on their characters, emotional participation), with tentative conclusions about the interpreter’s approach and priorities in such cases.