Interpreting - Volume 15, Issue 2, 2013

This study investigated bilingual working memory capacity (WMC) of 31 professional Auslan (Australian Sign Language)/English interpreters: 14 native signers and 17 non-native signers. Participants completed an English listening span task and then an Auslan working memory (WM) span task, each task followed by a brief interview. The native signers were similar to the non-native signers not only in English WMC, but also in Auslan WMC. There was no significant difference between WMC in English and Auslan when native and non-native signers were assessed as a single group. The study also found a moderate to strong, positive correlation between the interpreters’ English WMC and Auslan WMC, suggesting that both WM span tasks tapped into similar cognitive resources. In the interviews, interpreters said that they used multiple strategies to retain the to-be-remembered words/signs. The qualitative data also indicate that WM span tasks like these involve online retention of unrelated words/signs, whereas simultaneous interpreting requires temporary storage of meaningful and coherent concepts.

Research on dialogue interpreting shows that interpreters do not simply convey speech content, but also perform crucial coordinating and mediating functions. This descriptive study, which is based on PhD research conducted at the University of Manchester, explores the activity of qualified dialogue interpreters in three video-recorded parent-teacher meetings involving immigrant mothers. English and Italian are the languages used, the meetings having taken place in the UK (one case) and Italy (two cases). The study focuses on interpreters’ handling of evaluative assessment, in many cases introduced by them in the target speech as an “upgrading rendition”. Transcribed extracts are examined in a micro-analytical perspective, the dynamics of each actor’s (dis)engagement towards interlocutors being studied in relation to gaze patterns annotated by dedicated software. Results show that the interpreter actively promotes alignment between the parties; however, s/he often does so by emphasising positive considerations to the mother. The outcome of this approach is that the mother accepts, but is not encouraged to co-construct a negotiated solution: she is assimilated, not empowered.

Remote interpreting, whereby the interpreter is physically separated from those who need the interpretation, has been investigated in relation to conference and healthcare settings. By contrast, very little is known about remote interpreting in legal proceedings, where this method of interpreting is increasingly used to optimise interpreters’ availability. This paper reports the findings of an experimental study investigating the viability of videoconference-based remote interpreting in legal contexts. The study compared the quality of interpreter performance in traditional and remote interpreting, both using the consecutive mode. Two simulated police interviews of detainees, recreating authentic situations, were interpreted by eight interpreters with accreditation and professional experience in police interpreting. The languages involved were French (in most cases the interpreter’s native language) and English. Each interpreter interpreted one of the interviews in remote interpreting, and the other in a traditional face-to-face setting. Various types of problem in the interpretations were analysed, quantitatively and qualitatively. Among the key findings are a significantly higher number of interpreting problems, and a faster decline of interpreting performance over time, in remote interpreting. The paper gives details of these findings, and discusses the potential legal consequences of the problems identified.

This article reports on a study which is part of an ongoing project, investigating occupational status within the translation profession by focusing on professional translators and interpreters of different kinds and in different contexts. The study is specifically concerned with the job status of the category generally regarded as the stars of the profession, i.e. conference interpreters. It investigates the self-perceived occupational status of a group of Danish staff interpreters at the European Union, comparing it to that of Danish staff translators in the same organization. The research is based on data from an online survey, completed by 86 respondents (23 interpreters and 63 translators). The study hypothesis was that the conference interpreters would position themselves at the very top of the status continuum for the translation profession as a whole, and that the translators would situate themselves at a lower level — though not at the very bottom, considering their profile as staff translators in a prestigious international context. This hypothesis was only partially borne out by the research findings.