Interpreting - Volume 14, Issue 1, 2012

In this age of migration, many societies are characterized by linguistic and cultural diversity. Public institutions, such as health care systems, face the challenge of integrating new arrivals, immigrants, refugees or asylum seekers, into the host society. The purpose of this study was to examine how interpreters see their work within the context of the integration of immigrants into the host society (Switzerland) in general, and into the local health system in particular. We investigated the roles that interpreters working in a Women’s Hospital in Switzerland take on and are aware of in their work. The interpreters described four main roles: word-for-word interpreting, intercultural explanation, building patient–provider relationships, and accompanying immigrant patients. An additional cross-cutting theme emerged: interpreters facilitating the integration of immigration. Only the first of these is generally regarded as their “official” role. The interpreters take on the additional roles as necessary during a consultation, in response to the needs of the patient and the health professionals. Further discussion is needed about whether these additional roles should be recognized and promoted as part of their work since they are important and there is no one else to take them on. Interpreters who take on the additional roles related to integration have the potential to be important actors in health care services whose patient populations that are increasingly linguistically and culturally diverse.

In spite of the theoretically clearly defined task of an interpreter to translate only what was said by the other interlocutors, naturally occurring data taken from interpreted interactions show quite a different picture, as many previous studies have already indicated. The discursive norms to which an interpreter orients in reality are interactionally negotiated, rather than prediscursively determined. This article analyses these norms as interactional accomplishments in interpreted interactions that took place in a Belgian home for the elderly. This is not only a setting in which community interpreting has not been studied so far, but it is also a context that is ideally suited for this research topic, since its discursive institutional norms are not as strictly defined as in many other institutional settings, thus implying room for negotiating discursive norms on a turn-by-turn basis. The results demonstrate significant variation in the way breaches of interpreting norms are dealt with, both by the interpreter and by the professional, with the latter playing a particularly important role in shaping the norms that are observed in the course of the interaction. Finally, the implications of these deviations for the particular ‘activity type’ and the interpreter’s situated identity are discussed.

This paper presents an empirical study of the language of the notes produced by three groups of subjects with different levels of interpreter training and experience (beginner students, advanced students and interpreters) during an experimental consecutive interpreting task from English into Spanish. The variable under study was the note-taking language — source language vs. target language. Analyses of the notational corpus involved the application of quantitative methods so as to obtain data on the language of the notes at different skill acquisition and professional stages. The results show that as the subjects’ expertise level increases, there is a shift from the use of the source language towards the use of the target language. This finding suggests that the expertise level in consecutive interpreting may be a relevant factor in the interpreter’s choice of language. Finally, some conclusions are drawn regarding interpreter training.

This is a corpus-based study that investigates instances in which court interpreters in Hong Kong deviate from using direct speech and the first person, notwithstanding the requirement to use both of these when rendering statements made by witnesses or defendants. Quantitative data indicate that court interpreters do adhere to this requirement when interpreting Cantonese into English, but deviate from it when interpreting English into Cantonese. These data suggest that the use of reported speech and/or of the third person has identification functions that help Cantonese-speaking witnesses and defendants follow court proceedings and serve the pragmatic function of adding illocutionary force to interpreted utterances. Data from interviews with interpreters and legal professionals suggest that some latitude is exercised and tolerated when interpreters deviate from using direct speech and/or the first person when the target language is Cantonese. The findings indicate that court interpreters in the corpus observe strict professional guidelines by using direct speech most of the time, but occasional deviation from the direct approach suggests that court interpreters are able to make discretionary decisions to facilitate communication.

This article examines the different functions of the quotative ‘he/she says’ in an interpreter’s renderings during four medical interviews (Dutch/Russian). First, the quotative is typically used for renderings of doctors’ turns, where it serves to signal a switch in the participation framework and to segment long discourse units by the doctor. Second, in some renderings of the patients’ turns, the quotative also has a disambiguating function, clarifying the status of the interpretation either as a literal one or as an addition to a previous summary translation. Finally, in both types of interpretation the quotative also has a distancing function. However, the situations in which this function occurs vary: in the case of doctors’ turns, distancing occurs when face-threatening or dispreferred information is being given, while in the case of patients’ turns, it serves to co-construct the typical asymmetrical doctor–patient relation.