Interpreting As Interaction

Cecilia Wadensjo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138141315
• eBook ISBN: 9781317888499
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Interpreting in Interaction provides an account of interpreter-mediated communication, exploring the responsibilities of the interpreter and the expectations of both the interpreter and of other participants involved in the interaction. The book examines ways of understanding the distribution of responsibility of content and the progression of talk in interpreter-mediated institutional face-to-face encounters in the community interpreting context.

Bringing attention to discursive and social practices prominent in modern society but largely unexplored in the existing literature, the book describes and explains real-life interpreter-mediated conversations as documented in various public institutions, such as hospitals and police stations. The data show that the interpreter's prescribed role as a non-participating, non-person does not -and cannot - always hold true.

The book convincingly argues that this in one sense exceptional form of communication can be used as a magnifying glass in the grounded study of face-to-face institutional interaction more generally.

Cecilia Wadensjö explains and applies a Bakhtinian dialogic theory of language and mind, and offers an alternative understanding of the interpreter's task, as one consisting of translating and co-ordinating, and of the interpreter as an engaged actor solving problems of translatability and problems of mutual understanding in situated social interactions.

Teachers and students of translation and interpretation studies, including sign language interpreting, applied linguistics and sociolinguistics will welcome this text. Students and professionals within law, medicine and education will also find the study useful to help them understand the role of the interpreter within these frameworks.

One
Just an ordinary hearing

The hearing takes place somewhere in the middle of Sweden, at a police station in the town centre, upstairs on the second floor, in a small office in the immigration department. Four people have gathered for a short encounter, a male officer and his visitors, three women. The window behind the officer’s back is slightly open. It is an ordinary, mild, Nordic summer day.

One of the women has been called to the office to be interviewed about an application. She is a stranger to the place and to the people. Her problem is to prove herself suitably qualified to receive permission to stay in Sweden. This conversation, she knows, is crucial. Her problem involves correctly estimating what will get her application looked upon favourably, and to what extent she will be able to influence the authorities’ decision about her and her family’s future life.

As for the officer on the other side of the desk, he is highly experienced in this type of interview. To him it is just another routine case. This has been his workplace for more than ten years, and he knows perfectly well what information his employers regard as being relevant to obtain from an applicant. His job is to write a report, on the basis of which they will make their decision. He follows a prepared questionnaire, and he knows roughly on what grounds applications are usually refused or approved. His problem is to judge whether or not the person providing the information is trustworthy. Another problem is to give a reliable impression of himself, as a just civil servant of a democratic country. At the point where we enter the encounter, he is making inquiries about the applicant’s citizenship:

“And what do you think yourself? You are Greek, I know, you said that you are Greek, but it is one thing to consider … according to nationality and another thing to consider yourself to be a citizen of a certain state, I have in mind – meaning a state”

“I think that I am … a citizen of the Soviet Union, because. I was born there and I have been living there and there are many nationalities living in the Soviet Union.”

“No no she answered that she is a citizen of the USSR.”

“And even if I have been living all my life in the Soviet Union, anyhow I am counted as a Greek and not as a Russian. And in the passport- in the passport it also says that I am Greek- of Greek nationality.”

“And can you show me where?”

“No not in this one. This is an international passport and I had in mind a national one … “

What appears above is a written English translation of utterances which were originally voiced in Swedish and Russian. In the real communication situation the police officer and the applicant were assisted by an interpreter, translating what they said into their respective languages. Quoted above is the interpreter’s speech alone. Extracted in this way, one of her utterances – No no she answered that she is a citizen of the USSR - seems to be somewhat incongruous with the rest of the sequence. Who is the “she” referred to? Who is addressed? On whose behalf?

As it appears, the interpreter here comes in with an initiative of her own. Evidently, more is going on in the entire interaction than is reflected in the transcription of her utterances, even if these indeed do reflect what has been said by the others. It looks as if the interpreter takes on responsibility for some kind of interactional problem. What is she doing? Just translating? Interpreting? Mediating? Counteracting misunderstanding? Advocating?

There were four people present in the office on that occasion. I was the third woman in the room, observing the interview and documenting it on tape. Each of us had different goals in the encounter, vis-à-vis each other and in relation to the meeting itself, but we all – the police officer, the applicant, the interpreter and the researcher-observer – had one thing in common. We all understood and accepted the conversation as an interpreted one.

This book is about interpreter-mediated conversation as a mode of communication, about interpreters and their responsibilities, about what they do, what they think they should do and what others expect them to do in face-to-face, institutional encounters.

Following a descriptive approach to studies of interpreting, I will take the acting subjects’ definition of the situation. Given that people understand the communicative activity they are involved in to be an ‘interpreter-mediated encounter’ – how do they interact, as interpreters and as primary interlocutors respectively? The book is concerned with what goes on between the participants of this kind of encounter, rather than what goes on between the ears of the interpreters. Communicative conventions are normally shaped in and by monolingual interaction. How does the interpreter-mediated mode of communication affect these conventions? How is feared or suspected miscommunication handled? How, in interpreter-mediated encounters, is responsibility for the substance and the progression of interaction distributed between interlocutors? How can interpreters mark distinction between saying what others mean, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, talking on their own behalf?

1. The Themes of this Book

The approach in this work could be defined overall as a descriptive one. I will avoid giving oversimplified ‘directions for interpreting’ and problematize rather than confirm conventional normative thinking. The book aims at providing a set of analytical tools, food for thought and fuel for discussions. The main method is detailed analysis of discourse, documented in authentic encounters between people not able or willing to communicate in a common language. Through analysis of real-life situations I have gained knowledge about the dynamics of interpreter-mediated encounters.

The assistance of interpreters is a usual way to overcome language barriers in the everyday routines of many public institutions. Interpreter-mediated interaction, however, puts specific demands on those interacting; on interpreters, officials and lay people alike. A person involved in this, at one level of meaning, non-standard way of communicating, may experience it as problematic. The directness and transparency of ordinary talk is, by necessity, lacking. Making the dynamics of interpreter-mediated interaction more transparent, this book suggests ways to prepare for work in this mode, for interpreters and for actors dependent on interpreters’ assistance.

The aim of this book is also to develop a theoretical model of interpreter-mediated interaction shaped on the relevant practice. Of course, theoretical models are substantially different from actual cases. A theory of this complex and varying activity applies to cases in general. Actual cases are unique. The general case exists like an idea, while actual cases take place in reality, and each demands unique efforts from their participants, including the interpreter.

Nevertheless, if interpreting is to be acknowledged as a profession also when it occurs outside of international conferences, i.e. in the everyday life of public institutions and organisations, and if those of us who work as interpreters in legal, health, social service and other institutional face-to-face encounters are to gain the confidence and respect of the public, we need to have well-founded and shared ideas about what interpreting in these settings is all about, what interpreters are good for, and about preferred standards to apply in various situations.

1.1 Description before prescription

After reading the introductory vignette, many readers’ first reflections might well focus on whether or not the interpreter correctly translated the officer’s and the applicant’s original utterances (and also, perhaps, whether they were subsequently correctly translated into English). My written quotations of spontaneous speech may indeed look a bit odd to a reader’s eye. Nevertheless, my informed guess is that the interlocutors themselves did not reflect a lot on correctness in translation – at least, not while they were talking. They were much too occupied with making sense of what they heard, and with immediately responding to it.

Traditionally, studies on translation and interpretation are normative in character, either providing directives for correct translation, or building upon (implicit or explicit) ideas of correct language use. Authors’ perception of correctness in language use sometimes takes written language standards for granted even if the use of written texts generally differs rather substantially from language use in spontaneous spoken interaction.

Being myself an interpreter, I have felt a lack of theoretical ground for my work in this profession, and this became an important part of the impetus for this book. Through my readings, I have found studies of translation and interpretation to cover three main areas of interest. Many works investigate and evaluate the effectiveness of didactic strategies and models for translator and interpreter training. The normative (prescribing) orientation is often strong, since the adequacy and accuracy of teachers’ and students’ performances are of central interest.

Other authors are primarily concerned with the quality (adequacy, correctness etc.) of translators’ and interpreters’ work. Investigations and evaluations are performed through comparisons between original source language texts and translated target language texts. If emphasis is put on the original authors and their intentions the normative interest may focus on whether or not, or to what extent, translations and interpretations succeed or fail in fulfilling these intentions. A communicative perspective, in contrast, would mean that imagined readers or listeners and their needs and expectations are brought more into focus. These kinds of studies, promoted in modem translation theory (e.g. Toury 1995) are more concerned with how translations respond to the expectations and needs of a target culture.

A third body of literature focuses on the cognitive processes involved in translating and interpreting; on what goes on in the minds of translators and interpreters. This approach has been applied particularly to studies of simultaneous interpreting. Scientific investigations concern the performing interpreters’ cognitive skills, and the cognitive constraints involved in their working process. Theoretically this approach has close links to psycholinguistics, which often results in the application of a deductive, experimental or quasi-experimental research design. Studies with this orientation may also be normative, involving evaluations of individuals’ success or failure in correctly (within certain time-limits etc.) fulfilling given tasks.

This book takes a fourth stance and explores the social order of real-life interpreter-mediated conversations. It tries to detect what people present in these take as the normal, adequate, correct etc. way to act, given the current situation. For whom, when and why are what norms of language use valid? For instance, what communicative conventions are involved when the interpreter in the example above, talking on behalf of another person, suddenly switches from T to an emphasised ‘she’?

1.2 Interpreting versus advocacy

In her textbook on translation, Baker (1992) states that “as translators, we are primarily concerned with communicating the overall meaning of a stretch of language” (1992:10). For pedagogical reasons she then follows a bottom-up approach rather that a top-down one, taking words and phrases as starting points when defining units that would carry this “meaning”. This choice is somewhat at odds with Baker’s own conviction and with current reasoning in linguistics and translation studies. Hatim and Mason (1990) and several others suggest a top-down model, starting analyses of translation problems and strategies from text-type, and from the notion of texts as situated in contexts of culture.

It may be true, as Baker argues, that the bottom-up model is much easier to understand for people who have little training in linguistics (Baker 1992:6). It has a disadvantage though, which in the exploration of interpreter-mediated dialogue must be seen as a major drawback. It may contribute to cementing the position that words in and of themselves carry meaning, a meaning that can be decoded and subsequently re-coded into words belonging to another language.

I have participated in debates focusing on interpreters’ rights and obligations where a simplified version of this position is taken as an argument against interpreters’ advocacy. This ‘can be decoded and re-coded’ is, it seems, easily transformed into a ‘shall’. In line with this claim, two roles are frequently juxtaposed – ‘translator’ versus ‘mediator’, or (as for instance in the public service debate in Australia, United Kingdom and Canada) interpreting versus advocacy. ‘Advocacy’ in this context stands for actively supporting, defending and pleading for one of the parties – the client – while ‘interpreting’ would mean to avoid any such activity.

This juxtaposition also seems to play a certain role for researchers exploring interpreter-mediated discourse data. For example, Knapp-Potthoff and Knapp (1986) observe a tendency to be a ‘true third party’, rather than a ‘mere medium of transmission’, among people acting as interpreters, partly as an outcome of these persons’ lack of professionalism. One should note, however, that ‘professional interpreting’ in their terminology seems to stand for simultaneous conference interpreting, that is interpreting performed by people who are enclosed separately in a booth, effectively removed from face-to-face interaction (Knapp-Potthoff and Knapp 1986:153).

In my view this counter positioning, requiring a strong division between ‘translation’ and ‘mediation’ is partly an academic construct, intimately tied to conventional preconceptions of language, mind and communication. Regarding ‘interpreter-mediated interaction’ as a social phenomenon and the basic unit of investigation I must see ‘interpreting’ as consisting of both aspects. In theory, translating and mediating may be distinguishable activities, but in practice they are intimately intertwined.

Since I am dealing with spoken interaction, the starting point is not text-types but speech genres, situated in their socio-cultural contexts. This concept is borrowed from the Russian language philosopher Mikhail M. Bakhtin (Russian original 1979, translation in English 1986), whose work is an essential source of inspiration for this book. Following his ideas I will problematize the notion of ‘word’ and ‘meaning’. Again I will take the perspective of the acting subjects – the individuals whose interaction I am analysing -and try to find out what meaning they attribute to particular words; how phrases and stretches of talk make sense to different actors in situated events. This approach allows me to go beyond the discussion of ‘translation’ versus ‘mediation’, to explore instead the dynamic inter-activity of interpreter-mediated conversation. I take for granted that individuals, including interpreters, are subjects who make sense in their own subjective ways. Starting from an interactionistic perspective, ‘language’ or ‘languages’ as systems of linguistic items are partly of analytical interest, but the focus is on the dynamic processes of individuals’ language use.

To recast Baker’s (1992:10) statement of my aims, applying th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Author’s Acknowledgements
• Publisher’s Acknowledgements
• General Editor’s Preface
• Transcription Conventions
• 1. Just an ordinary hearing
• 2. Talk as text and talk as activity
• 3. Community interpreting: going professional
• 4. Interpreters and other intermediaries
• 5. Discourse studies – on method and analytical framework
• 6. Ideal interpreting and actual performance
• 7. In a communicative pas de trois
• 8. Communication and miscommunication
• 9. When I say what you mean
• 10. Bridging gaps and sustaining differences
• Bibliography
• Index
• Author Index