Text and Context

Essays on Translation and Interpreting in Honour of Ian Mason

Mona Baker, Maeve Olohan, Maria Pérez Calzada

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781905763252
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317640059
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Ian Mason has been a towering presence in the now flourishing discipline of translation studies since its inception, and has produced some of the most influential and detailed analyses of translated text and interpreted interaction to date. The sophistication, dynamism and inclusiveness that have characterized his approach to all forms of mediation are the hallmarks of his legacy.

Text and Context celebrates Ian Mason's scholarship by bringing together fourteen innovative and original pieces of research by both young and established scholars, who examine different forms of translation and interpreting in a variety of cultural and geographical settings. In line with his own inclusive approach to the field, these contributions combine close textual analysis with keen attention to issues of power, modes of socialization, institutional culture, individual agency and ethical accountability. While paying tribute to one of the most innovative and influential scholars in the field, the volume offers novel insights into a variety of genres and practices and charts important new directions for the discipline.

III. Institutional Context & Individual Agency

Negotiating Identities in the European Parliament

The Role of Simultaneous Interpreting

MORVEN BEATON-THOME

University of Manchester, UK

Abstract. This article investigates the role of simultaneous interpreting (SI) in the European Parliament, focusing on the effect SI has on identity construction and negotiation via detailed comparative analysis of the use of the first person plural ‘we’. Data from a case study on the potential resettlement of Guantánamo Bay detainees in EU member states is explored using the concepts of in-group and out-group identities to establish interpreter positioning and stance. Descriptive analysis is conducted in three categories: stable ‘we’ group reference in both ST and TT; ST/TT shifts in ‘we’ reference; and the introduction of ‘we’ reference in the TT where no identifiable trigger exists in the ST. Findings suggest that a trend could be established in the simultaneous interpretations towards intensified use of the inclusive we to refer to we, the parliamentary community and we, the EU, at the expense of more peripheral identities such as the national, regional and political group. This points towards a tendency of SI to strengthen the dominant institutional presence, ideology and identity and weaken or fail to represent the full complexity of the ‘traffic in voices’ (Bakhtin 1981) and heteroglot identities present in such an institution.

As the largest employer of translators and conference interpreters worldwide (Directorate General for Interpretation website), the European Union (EU) provides rich data for an investigation of translation and interpreting in an institutional setting. The European Parliament (EP), with its special status as the only democratically elected body within the EU, is a forum in which the ideological significance of multilingual communication and transparency of proceedings in all official languages is particularly salient. Consequently, translators and interpreters would appear to be central to the functioning of the Parliament and, by extension, the political institution of the EU as a whole. However, despite this seemingly pivotal role, translators and interpreters have been accorded little attention in the extensive critical discourse-based studies into the ideological importance of multilingualism for the EU that are currently available (see Wodak 2007 for a comprehensive overview), or anthropological and political investigations into the institution (see Koskinen 2008:63–64). Indeed, in translation studies itself, relatively few researchers have devoted attention to the ideological significance of written translation or conference interpreting in the EU. In focusing on the ideological significance of transitivity patterns in a corpus of written translations of EP plenary sessions (Calzada Pérez 1997, 2007, Mason 2003/2004), detailed ethnographic study of translation in the European Commission, including text and discourse analysis of various texts in the drafting process of institutional translations (Koskinen 2008), and the effect of simultaneous interpreting on heteroglossic discourse in a corpus of EP plenary debates (Beaton 2007a, 2007b), these researchers share a concern with broader sociological and institutional issues and their manifestation in tangible discoursal and textual properties. This combined approach is also pursued in this article, which responds to Mason’s plea that “the need to relate the sociology and politics of translation to actual translation behaviour – as evidenced in the textual moves translators make – has never been greater” (Mason, in Preface to Calzada Pérez 2007:XV).

Despite historical explorations of the ideological implications of the provision of simultaneous interpreting in other multilingual institutions such as the Nuremburg trials (Gaiba 1998) and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Wallmach 2002), the few available studies on interpreting in the EU context have focused on exploring the interpretation of institutional terms (Marrone 1998), specific organizational and cultural constraints of the institution itself (Marzocchi 1998), describing and establishing interpreting norms and their didactic application in the EU institutional context (Vuorikoski 2004), directionality (Monti et al. 2005) or investigating the role of repeated formulaic phrases in EU discourse (Henriksen 2007). In contrast, institutional public service and legal interpreting settings have attracted increased interest in ideological questions such as the appropriation of power in the asylum context (Blommaert 2001, Inghilleri 2007, Maltby 2008, Maryns 2006), role distribution and participant status in police interviews (Wadensjö 1998) and mental health settings (Bot 2005), or politeness and the exercise of control through discursive features of interpreted utterances in the courtroom (Berk-Seligson 1990, Hale 2004). Such settings provide rich data on interaction that challenges the traditional view of the interpreter as a mere conduit (Reddy 1999), a view which still pervades much discourse on professional conference interpreting and has only recently been convincingly challenged in conference interpreting research (Diriker 2004).

Building on my earlier research on the ideological significance of simultaneous interpreting provision in the European Parliament (Beaton 2007a, 2007b), this article will focus on the effect of SI on the construction and negotiation of the identities of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in the English and German language versions of ‘heteroglossic’ (Bakhtin 1981) discourse in the EP. In particular, I will focus on the ideological significance of the first person plural we and the role it plays in the construction and negotiation of ‘in- and out-group identities’. For the purposes of this article, the term ‘ideology’ will be used “in the neutral sense of a world view, a largely unconscious theory of the way the world works accepted as common sense” (Fowler 1985:65), with ‘common sense’ understood as “the implicit social knowledge that group members take for granted in their everyday social practices” (van Dijk 1998:102).¹ Examples of German-to-English and English-to-German SI will be drawn from a case study of a debate in the plenary part-session² on the potential resettlement of Guantánamo Bay detainees in European Union member states.

1.	Personal pronoun use in institutional interpreting

Research on the negotiation of identity in interpreted interactions as evident in pronominal use has predominantly focused on the relationship between the choice of first or third person in interpreters’ utterances and participant perception of interpreter role (Bot 2005, Bührig & Meyer 2003, Wadensjö 1998), or on forms of address in languages which differentiate between formal and informal second person pronouns (T/V distinction) (Angermeyer 2005, Berk-Seligson 1990, Krouglov 1999). Shifts in the use of forms of address have also been conceptualized as shifts between formal and informal registers (Hale 1997, Krouglov 1999). In these studies of authentic data, both shifts and inconsistent use of pronouns have been found to occur in all categories. Instances of inconsistent use of the first person singular I were also identified in Diriker’s (2004) corpus-based study of conference interpreters, which showed clear evidence of the use of at least four different types of I, indicating that interpreter identity is more fluid and hybrid than meta-discoursal evidence would suggest. Rather than dismissing these findings as evidence of insufficient professional training, this data can be approached in qualitative terms and individual extracts analyzed according to the effect the change has on the continuation of the interaction and on interpreters’ construction of their identities and the identities of other participants. This ‘take-up’ (Mason 2006:365) approach could potentially provide data on how interpreters position themselves as individuals and/or as a group within the institution.

In contrast to previous studies, the present study focuses exclusively on simultaneous interpreting in which two to three professional interpreters per booth interpret interventions from multiple speakers into the language of that booth for an audience consisting of MEPs at the Parliament and a number of external groups listening to the debate, either present at the debate or listening remotely to live or archived web streaming. The repercussions for the negotiation of individual speaker identity and the ideological potential for interpreters to influence perception of the identity of individual MEPs in the debate as a whole are particularly salient in this context. If interpreter influence is viewed as a continuum, we could situate, at one pole, varying interpreter personal style (van Besien and Meuleman 2008) and, at the other end of the continuum, the observed tendency of interpreters in the one booth to gravitate towards a similar style in which all speakers are interpreted in an “increasingly formulaic and thus progressively uniform” manner (Henriksen 2007:17). In ideological terms, drawing on Bakhtin (1981:273), these two tendencies have been previously categorized as “centrifugal (heteroglossic)” and “centripetal (unitary) forces”, respectively (Beaton 2007a:273). These Bakhtinian terms will also be employed in the analysis offered in this article.

2.	Categorizing personal pronoun use in political debate

If cohesion is understood as “the ways in which the components of the surface text, i.e. the actual words we hear or see, are mutually connected within a sequence” (Beaugrande and Dressler 1981:3), the personal pronoun we can be categorized as a type of ‘pro-form’, with pro-forms defined as “economical, short words empty of their own particular content, which can stand in the surface text in place of more determinate, content-activating expressions” (ibid.:60). Pro-forms are used to refer anaphorically and less frequently cataphorically to nouns or noun phrases used elsewhere in the text. According to this approach, the pro-form is a “long range cohesive device” (ibid.:80). This type of easily recoverable anaphoric we reference is present in the debate under analysis here, as in the following example from Graham Watson, British MEP and Chairman of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe in the European Parliament (ALDE), where the we at the start of the second sentence refers anaphorically to Europe in the first sentence:

But Europe cannot stand back, shrug its shoulders and say that these things are for America alone to sort out. We lack the open debate and the collective change of will which American democracy allows.

However, the overwhelming majority of we references in the debate cannot be recovered by investigation of textual co-reference alone. In Halliday and Hasan’s terms, this form of we reference is not cohesive but “exophoric” (1976:33), meaning that it is a situational rather than textual reference. Halliday and Hasan then proceed to exclude first and second person personal pronoun use from a study of cohesion, stating that

it is only the anaphoric type of reference that is relevant to cohesion, since it provides a link with a preceding portion of the text. When we talk of the cohesive function of personal reference, therefore, it is particularly the third person forms that we have in mind. (Halliday and Hasan 1976:51)

The analysis offered here will therefore distinguish between cohesive we reference in the form of anaphoric and cataphoric co-reference and we reference in the form of exophoric reference. It is particularly this latter use of we to refer to agents outside the text that is of significance in a study of positioning, where it is exactly the lack of a determinate textual referent that is significant in the construction and negotiation of identities. Given that this is particularly salient in the case of the use of we, study of interpreter response to such indeterminate pronoun use, particularly in the ‘on-line’ simultaneous mode, is of special interest. Indeed, such exophoric we reference is part of a system of self- and other references which are “key to the reconstruction and negotiation of identities and social roles, and to the definition of the co participants’ interpersonal relationships, where they may signify intimacy, distance, or social hierarchy” (Bull and Fetzer 2006:3–4). As such, it is highly salient in terms of ideology, as pronominal choice can often indicate speaker positioning, distancing and stance on a particular issue. In the rhetoric of “othering”, “expressions that are the most revealing of the boundaries separating Self and Other are inclusive and exclusive pronouns and possessives such as we and they, us and them and our and theirs” (Riggins 1997:8). The concepts of the Self and the Other, identification and distance, are also mirrored in positive “in-group positioning” and negative “out-group positioning” in van Dijk’s (1998:267) ideological square. It is these concepts of in- and out-group identities that I will draw on in this discussion.

Given the indeterminate use of we reference outlined above, developing categories of reference for the current analysis proved problematic. The distinction drawn in communicative grammar (Leech and Svartvik 1975/1994:58) between hearer “inclusive we” (Let’s go to the dance tonight, shall we?) and hearer “exclusive we” (We’ve all enjoyed meeting you) is often employed in analyses of this type. This distinction is useful in indicating a general position, but it does not account for all the subtleties of we reference. It is not the focus of this article to discuss these subtleties in detail (cf. Mühlhäusler and Harré 1990:168–78 for a detailed functional analysis); nevertheless, further we distinctions need to be made for the analysis to proceed. In what follows, I will therefore draw on a modified version of Íñigo-Mora’s (2004) categorization of we groups in British parliamentary discourse. Her categorization distinguishes between four distinct groups: (1) exclusive (I + my political group), (2) inclusive (I + you), (3) parliamentary community (I + parliamentary community), and (4) generic (I + all British people) (ibid.:49). As this categorization was developed for the British Parliam...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• I. Language Matters
• II. Forms of Mediation
• III. Institutional Context & Individual Agency
• IV. The Impact of Translation & Interpreting in a Changing World
• Notes on Editors and Contributors
• Index
• Subject Index