Interpreting - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2009

This paper attempts a reading of the interpreter’s social and cultural role through a return to origins, to the ancient Greek god Hermes, who was, among other things, the mediator between gods and humans. Hermes’s ambivalent position and nature — conveying and at the same time manipulating the messages of the gods — are taken as a point of departure in order to highlight the complexity of the interpreting process. Interpreters, poised in the same liminal space of in-betweenness, are asked to promote communication, remaining faithful to the speaker and retaining for themselves an invisible presence (or absence?). The questions of invisibility and neutrality are further discussed in the second part of the paper, where Sydney Pollack’s film The Interpreter (2005) is taken as a case study. The lead character of the film, an interpreter, moves from perfect neutrality to full involvement in the interpreting process, and faces the consequences of this violation of an “omnipresent” ethical code that demands absence rather than presence on the part of the interpreter.

This study addresses the strategies used by simultaneous interpreters when confronted with syntactically complex sentences and with a high speed of delivery. The material consists of recordings of fifteen professional interpreters rendering two passages (one with a complex sentence structure, the other with a high speed of delivery) from French into Dutch. Most, but not all, interpreters managed to produce an acceptable translation. In the case of the complex passage, most interpreters opted for a segmentation strategy, while a few applied a tailing strategy. In the case of the high delivery speed, most opted for a tailing strategy, but a few applied segmentation.

This survey-based study examined the views of 226 legal professionals and 36 interpreting practitioners in Australia with respect to the role of the court interpreter and the quality of interpreting and revealed a statistically significant gap between the perceptions of the two professional groups. Both groups, however, were ambivalent in relation to some practical aspects of court interpreting, such as cultural intervention and the reproduction of speech style. The findings indicate that legal professionals generally held a favourable view of the overall quality of court interpreting. Both groups supported specialist certification for court interpreters.

The paper explores the professional practice of “cultural mediation” in the Italian context. This activity is taken here as a vantage point from which the dynamics of identity projections can be observed, as they emerge from a real-life interaction. The analysis is carried out on a recorded and transcribed encounter involving three participants: a service provider working for a Foreigners Advice Bureau run by the municipal authorities of a major Italian city; a French-speaking asylum seeker from Cameroon; and a Moroccan mediator. The encounter is characterised by a high degree of interactional heterogeneity; triadic configurations where the mediator acts as “interpreter” alternate with parallel conversations and with long dyadic exchanges between the mediator and the service user, in the absence of the service provider. Within this changeable participation framework, the interlocutors’ discursive choices are closely examined. The theoretical framework brings together two complementary paradigms, a linguistic-interactional and a socio-psychological one. The resulting discussion, which revolves around the concepts of “role”, “discourse”, “position” and “narrative”, reveals cultural mediation as an area of instability, where competing identities are interactively constructed and reconstructed.