The Return to Ethics

Special Issue of The Translator (Volume 7/2, 2001)

Anthony Pym

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781134966301
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

If civilizations are to cooperate as well as clash, our mediators must solve problems using serious thought about relations between Self and Other.

Translation Studies has thus returned to questions of ethics. But this is no return to any prescriptive linguistics of equivalence. As the articles in this volume show, ethics is now a broadly contextual question, dependent on practice in specific cultural locations and situational determinants. It concerns people, perhaps more than texts. It involves representing dynamics, seeking specific goals, challenging established norms, and bringing theory closer to historical practice.

The contributions to this volume study a wide range of translational activity, questioning global copyright regimes, denouncing exploitation within the translation profession, defending a Bible translation in terms of mutlilateral loyalty, and delving into the dynamics of popular genres, the culture bubbles of talk shows, the horrors of disaster relief in Turkey, military interpreters in the Balkans, and urgent political pleas from a Greek prison. The theoretical approaches range from empirical text analysis to applications of fuzzy logic, passing through a proposed Translator's Oath and converging in a common concern with cross-cultural alterity

Look Who’s Talking

The Ethics of Entertainment and Talkshow Interpreting

DAVID KATAN & FRANCESCO STRANIERO-SERGIO*
Università di Trieste, Italy

Abstract. The role of interpreters working on Italian television is undergoing change. The traditional role, that of an invisible black box, is being challenged by what we define as an ethics of entertainment. The three principal factors affecting this ethics are professional performing capacity, ‘the comfort factor’, and the context of culture. A corpus of 200 hours of Italian talk show interpreting is drawn on to illustrate the tension between the traditional norms of fidelity or invisibility and the needs of TV emotainment (visible involvement and performance). In analyzing the successful interpreter’s strategies and behaviour we suggest that a solution to this double bind lies in an expansion of the traditional role toward multivariate mediation encompassing varying perceptual positions and sensitivity to context.

We wish to investigate a new and still evolving ethics of interpreting in TV talkshows. Here we will argue that the traditional ethics regarding profes-sionalism in interpreting is not so much being flouted or threatened as being given the opportunity to develop – at least in Italy, where the phenomenon is extremely visible due to the large number of foreign guests regularly invited on TV.

Italian television is an important employer of interpreters. Between 100 and 200 work days are offered each year, with only a tiny amount represented by simultaneous interpreting of news events. Talkshow interpreting accounts for 70– 80% of the work, which can be delivered either consecutively or simultaneously. Most of our material contains examples of consecutive interpretation.

Traditionally, two ethical tenets have governed the interpreter’s behaviour in face-to-face professional encounters, be it in courtroom or immigration work, medical consultations or business negotiations: unreserved loyalty to the source text and a clear-cut role definition. In this paper the claim will be made that talkshow interpreting challenges both these tenets: the visibility of the interpreter is creating a new model of ethics, based on management or mediation between partners and the assumption of a multivariate role.

We begin by outlining the main features of talkshows in terms of institutional discourse, conversational genre, participants, topics and goals. We then discuss the ethics of entertainment and compare received opinion concerning professional norms with our corpus. This comprises 200 hours of actual in-terpreting taped over the last three years from a representative selection of the most popular talkshows on Italian TV (see Straniero Sergio 1999a).

1. Information versus entertainment

Interpreter-mediated institutional interactions are mostly ‘elicitation proce-dures’ (Circourel 1988) aimed at obtaining information, testing the knowledge or the skills of interviewees or constructing accusations. Adelswärd (1992:143) has called this type of conversational genre the ‘evaluative interview’:

This kind of interview has become an increasingly important tool for professionals in modern society. Therapists talk patients into self-diagnosis; social workers interview clients in order to place them in the proper category […] clerks interview customers to find out if they are eligible for bank loans; policemen talk with suspects in order to find the truth – or at least in order to be able to write adequate reports […] personnel officers interview applicants in order to find the right man for the job, etc.

This kind of institutional evaluation is quite alien to the talkshow, since the primary recipients of the opinions expressed on television are not the onscreen (physically present) participants but the overhearing audience or mass viewers. Unlike, for example, the jurors at a trial, TV viewers are not required to issue a verdict but simply to enjoy themselves. Thus, the entertainment function prevails over the information function. Likewise, the phatic, that is, the use of language to establish atmosphere and maintain social contact (Malinowski 1923), prevails over the referential. This requires a reassessment of existing theories of cooperation, relevance and politeness, as well as a redefinition of the roles of interpreters and, more specifically, their visibility.

1.1 The talkshow: a hybrid genre

The talkshow is characterized by an increasing contamination of different codes, languages and styles, as is demonstrated by the spread of hybrid forms that designate numerous types of programmes: ‘docu-drama’, ‘docu-fiction’, ‘faction’ (fact+fiction), ‘infotainment’, ‘confrotainment’, ‘emotainment’ and the like.

Many talkshows are a mixture of genres imported from other fields such as the interview, discussion/debate, romance, testimony, confession, drama and story-telling. Television recontextualizes and transforms these genres through a process that Fairclough (1992) has called ‘interdiscursivity’, the construction of a text from different discourses and genres. For example, the various programmes falling under the heading of ‘debate’ share the feature of ‘public access genres’, through which “the mass media offer an informal, unofficial, but nonetheless large-scale, institutionally managed forum for public debate” (Livingstone & Lunt 1994:36).

The purpose of a talkshow, though, is not to reach a conclusion or an agreement on the topic under discussion. On the contrary, it is a communicative situation in which people who do not know each other are asked to chat for entertainment purposes. From this standpoint, talkshow chat, albeit institutionalized and simulated, resembles ordinary conversation, the nature of which is essentially ‘non task-related’ (Goffman 1981; Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1990; Linell 1998). The conversation is not even intended to discuss a specific topic. What counts is not the truth (or credibility) of what is being said but the mise en scène of its discussion. In fact, conflict, disagreement or controversy are nothing but expedients to attract the audience. As Richardson and Meinhof maintain, “the spectacle in talkshows resides in the emphasis upon display, shock and confrontation” (1999:131–32).

In the talkshow context, traditional discourse genres go by the board, since the primacy of the private over the public has delegitimized the expert. As Carpignano et al. have noted, “in debate the authority of the expert is replaced by the authority of a narrative informed by lived experience” (1990:53). Personalities, from actors to showgirls, are invited to speak alongside scientists, sociologists, politicians and ordinary people. Within the same talkshow there can be different contexts of representation, from ‘social issues in personal perspective’ to ‘trash talkshows’ (Haarman 1999:203–225). The formula of many talkshows consists of a continuous mix and turnover of guests and topics.

It is thus difficult – at least as far as Italian television is concerned – to distinguish between ‘monothematic’ and ‘polythematic’ talkshows (Charaudeau & Ghiglione 1997:135), ‘personality-type talkshows’ and ‘issue-type talkshows’ (Carbough 1988), ‘elite talkshows’ and ‘vox pop talkshows’ (Dahlgren 1995:62), ‘evening celebrity talkshows’ and ‘daytime talkshows’ (Haarman 1999:200), or even between ‘audience discussion programmes’ and ‘current affairs or consumer affairs’ (Livingstone & Lunt 1994:38). Talkshow elements are also to be found in the evening news, in which the newscaster interacts with a celebrity, as is shown by the interviews with Demi Moore, Meryl Streep, Harrison Ford, Woody Allen and Richard Gere that are in our corpus. Many talkshows are not labelled as such. In fact, most ‘serious’ programmes that popularize medicine, science and technology on Italian television employ talkshow-style communicative strategies and interactional styles, covering the same topics and, more often than not, using the same guests.

A distinctive trait of talkshows, which interpreters are becoming more involved in, is the production of personal stories in public. These stories may already be in the news, and will include, above all, crime, sex, drama and passion. In this mixture of testimony, therapy and confession, frequently interspersed with songs, quizzes and games, television storytelling seems to provide the viewer with an escape valve and an occasion for re-evaluating one’s private life. According to Livingstone & Lunt (1994:67),

[…] the visibility accorded to people’s problems could itself be therapeutic, encouraging people to recognize their problems and to desire a solution: certain experiences are recognized, legitimated and shared, the expression of emotions may be cathartic, and ordinary people can prove to themselves and to the public, “this happened to me and I survived”.

Similarly, Carpignano et al. (1990:51) maintain that “the purpose of the talkshow is not cognitive but therapeutic […], not a balance of viewpoints but a serial association of testimonials […], not an argumentative line [but] the aura of a ritual”. This stands in sharp contrast to what happens in welfare-services interviews, where “a client’s account of troubles [is] transformed into a professional problem definition” (Ravotas & Berkenkotter 1998:217), and the information the client supplies is re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: The Return to Ethics in Translation Studies
• Proposal for a Hieronymic Oath
• The Thorn of Translation in the Side of the Law: Toward Ethical Copyright and Translation Rights
• Death of a Ghost. A Case Study of Ethics in Cross-Generation Relations between Translators
• Loyalty Revisited: Bible Translation as a Case in Point
• Ethos, Ethics and Translation: Toward a Community of Destinies
• Look Who’s Talking: The Ethics of Entertainment and Talkshow Interpreting
• Translating Urgent Messages
• Interpreters-in-Aid at Disasters: Community Interpreting in the Process of Disaster Management
• Ethics in the Fuzzy Domain of Interpreting: A ‘Military’ Perspective
• Revisiting the Classics
• Book Reviews