Dialogue Interpreting

Ian Mason

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781900650212
• eBook ISBN: 9781317640950
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Dialogue interpreting includes what is variously referred to in English as Community, Public Service, Liaison, Ad Hoc or Bilateral Interpreting - the defining characteristic being interpreter-mediated communication in spontaneous face-to-face interaction. Included under this heading are all kinds of professional encounters: police, immigration and welfare services interviews, doctor-patient interviews, business negotiations, political interviews, lawyer-client and courtroom interpreting and so on. Whereas research into conference interpreting is now well established, the investigation of dialogue interpreting as a professional activity is still in its infancy, despite some highly promising publications in recent years. This special issue of The Translator, guest-edited by one of the leading scholars in translation studies, provides a forum for bringing together separate strands within this developing field and should create an impetus for further research.

Viewing the interpreter as a gatekeeper, coordinator and negotiator of meanings within a three-way interaction, the descriptive studies included in this volume focus on issues such as role-conflict, in-group loyalties, participation status, relevance and the negotiation of face, thus linking the observation of interpreting practice to pragmatic constraints such as power, distance and face-threat and to semiotic constraints such as genres and discourses as socio-textual practices of particular cultural communities.

Police Interpreting

Politeness and Sociocultural Context

ALEXANDER KROUGLOV

Diplomatic Service Language Centre Foreign & Commonwealth Office, London, UK

Abstract. Police interpreting is somewhat unjustly neglected by most recent linguistic studies. As an act of necessary and therefore intense interpersonal and intercultural communication, police interpreting provides an excellent example of the way in which an interpreter deals with colloquialisms and hedges, as well as forms of address and other forms of politeness. This paper is based on the analysis of four short extracts from interviews with Russian witnesses conducted at a police station by English speaking detectives and interpreted by four different interpreters. The findings suggest that interpreters often avoid or change colloquialisms and hedges, which could provide evidence of pragmatic intention. The extracts also confirm that interpreters tend to misrepresent the speaker by introducing more polite forms, which in turn can make the testimony of a witness either less certain or more definite. A brief analysis of some in-group terminology in interpreting is also offered.

Dialogue interpreting involves a significant element of sociocultural analysis, where interpreters mediate “linguistically as well as culturally” between speakers of different languages (Dollerup 1993:139). A number of scholars have examined the ways in which interpreting is performed in various settings, such as legal encounters, immigration and employment interviews, schools, public safety, community agency services and public health.¹ But dialogue interpreting nevertheless remains insufficiently researched in comparison with other types of interpreting.

This article is based on a study of dialogue interpreting as performed in the rather extreme circumstances of a police interview, in which examining detectives and testifying witnesses participate in question-and-answer interaction. The information presented is based on a corpus of data gathered during the police investigation of a murder case in which the witnesses, the suspect and the victim were all Russian sailors. Since the incident took place in the port of an English-speaking country, interpreters were called upon to help with the investigation. The interviews of witnesses and the suspect were conducted at a police station by English-speaking detectives. We shall be looking at some of the key factors which may affect the outcome of the police interview. These are:

• alteration/preservation of speech styles in interpretation;

• deletion, addition or modification of politeness (hedges, address forms, diminutives and other in-group identity markers);

• the availability of a situational context;

• the interpreter’s awareness of linguistic and cultural features of both source and target languages.

Interpreters in police investigations are entrusted with enabling meaningful communication to take place between speakers who belong to different cultures. Culture-specific linguistic items such as colloquialisms, forms of politeness (including hedges), and forms of address all play an important role in shaping this type of interaction. The analysis and discussion will be based on four short extracts from the first round of interviews performed by four different interpreters and will focus on the interpreters’ use of colloquialisms and their treatment of hedges, forms of address and politeness, as well as their awareness of the socio-cultural context.²

1. Colloquialisms

During police interviews interpreters are often faced with having to translate a number of lexical, stylistic and grammatical colloquialisms common to the interviewees’ speech. Witnesses try to use their verbal skills in order to appear credible and sincere, while police detectives form their line of questioning in such a way as to induce witnesses to talk. Problems generally arise when witnesses and interpreters diverge in their linguistic and cultural spheres of experience, with a resultant difference in usage and variety of the lexical units they employ.

In the first interview below, the witness uses a number of colloquialisms and hedges, some of which are interpreted into the target language while others are not.

Record of interview: witness 1

(D = Detective; I = Interpreter; W = Witness)

1	D	So what happened when V came on board the ship?
2	I	Itak, chto sluchilos’, kogda V prishel na korabl’? So, what happened when V came on the ship?
3	W	Sho, kto ego znaet, kogda on prishel. No, kogda ya uslykhal shum,
3a		ya vstal i dver’ otkryl. What, who knows when he came. But, when I heard the noise, I got up and opened the door.
4	I	I don’t know when he came. But, when I heard the noise, I got
4a		up and opened my door.
5	D	Did you see V?
6	I	Vy videli V? Did you see V?
7	W	Nu, da. On stoyal u kayuty A. Well, yes. He stood near the cabin of A.
8	I	Well, yes. He stood at the door of uhh A’s cabin.
9	D	What did he do then?
10	I	Chto on delal potom? What did he do then?
11	W	Sho on delal? On skazal A: “Ya tebya uroyu.” What did he do? He said to A: “I’ll dig you”.
12	I	He said to A: “I’ll kill you.”

Witness 1 speaks informal Russian, with some elements of the southern Russian dialect: for example, he uses sho instead of the standard Russian chto (‘what’; lines 3,11). Another feature which is characteristic of the speech style of this witness is the repetition of the phrase uttered by the previous speaker. For example, when the detective asks him what he did then (line 9), he reiterates by responding Sho on delal? (lit.: ‘What did he do?’; line 11). This stylistic feature disappears in the interpreted version. The witness repeats the question as a way of confirming that the question has been understood correctly. Sometimes this repetition can be partial, as in line 3, when the witness repeats only the question word sho (‘what’), which again is omitted in the interpreted version. All of these features of cohesive, naturally-occurring conversation, which are peculiar to the speech of the first witness, are either diminished or disappear in interpretation.

Hatim and Mason (1990:42) argue that interpreters who work in courts with “interlocutors of vastly differing social status (e.g. barrister and accused person), find themselves tempted to neutralize social dialect for the sake of improved mutual comprehension, and to avoid appearing patronising”. There is evidence of this tendency in the current data, as more colloquial SL forms such as uslykhal (‘heard’, line 3; instead of uslyshal) or unusual word order as in dver otkryl (lit.: ‘door opened’; line 3a) are not matched by corresponding colloquial equivalents in the interpreted version. Another example of what might be described as ‘neutralization’ in the TL interpretation can be found in lines 3 and 4, where the colloquial phrase Kto ego znaet (lit.: ‘who knows it’; line 3) is interpreted by the stylistically...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• The Hospital Cleaner as Healthcare Interpreter A Case Study
• The Tenor of Consultant Physicians Implications for Medical Interpreting
• Information Loss in Bilingual Medical Interviews through an Untrained Interpreter
• Signs of Injustice
• Telephone Interpreting & the Synchronization of Talk in Social Interaction
• “Nicole Slapped Michelle” Interpreters and Theories of Interpreting at the O. J. Simpson Trial
• Police Interpreting Politeness and Sociocultural Context
• The Interpreter on the (Talk) Show Interaction and Participation Frameworks
• Revisiting the Classics
• Course Profile
• Appendix A Screening Test (conducted in Spanish; presented here in English translation)
• Appendix B Syllabus for First Training Course
• Appendix C Sample Scenario for Role-Playing
• Dialouge Interpreting