The impact of context on
community interpreting research, practice & training
Esther de Boe
University of
Antwerp, Belgium
esther.deboe@uantwerpen.be
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3430-9204
Katalin Balogh
KU Leuven, Belgium
katalin.balogh@kuleuven.be
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7455-9841
Heidi Salaets
KU Leuven, Belgium
heidi.salaets@kuleuven.be
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0148-4188
Abstract
Although the notion of context is
omnipresent in research in interpreting studies (IS), especially in community
settings, and defines the ways in which interpreting is being practised, researched
and trained, it has not yet been recognized or defined as a topic in its own
right, at least not within IS. Starting from some theoretical notions on the
concept of context, this article moves on to discuss different levels of
context, namely, geographical, socio-institutional and interactional. By means
of examples from a variety of settings in community interpreting (CI), it shows
how the different levels of context interact, and, in these ways, have an impact
on CI practice, research and training.
Keywords: interpreting studies, community interpreting, geographical
context, socio-institutional context, interactional context, training
1. Introduction
This thematic issue shines the spotlight on the
concept of context in interpreting in community or public-service settings. As
Vlasenko (2019) puts it, “from a research point of view, a focus on context
brings to the fore the sociological, anthropological and political aspects of
translation and interpreting as embedded social practices” (pp. 437–438). In
its communicative sense, context is considered “a resource deployed in concrete
socially-situated meaning-making action” (Blommaert et al., 2018, p. 2), located
at the “intersection of language/discourse and social structure” (Blommaert,
2001, p. 14). In line with this, community interpreting (CI) can be viewed as a
specific type of “meaning-making action” that is deeply embedded in this
intersection of language and social structures in a particular legal,
political, economic or cultural context (Pöchhacker, 2016, p. 160). In the
day-to-day practices in which interpreters are involved, issues of culture,
language and power continuously intersect (Cho, 2021, p. 2).
CI goes by many different names. As Dal Fovo and
Niemants (2015, p. 3) point out, the terminology varies from “liaison
interpreting” (Gentile & Ozolins, 1996) and “community interpreting” (e.g.,
Hale, 2007; Wadensjö, 2011) to “public service interpreting” (e.g., Corsellis,
2008; Valero-Garcés, 2014) and various others. Some researchers have favoured the term “dialogue interpreting” (Mason,
2001) to stress its dialogic character (e.g., Davitti, 2018; Dal Fovo &
Niemants, 2015) based on the argument that this denomination corresponds to the
“correlation between mode, setting and interaction type” that “identifies DI [dialogue
interpreting] with a kind (rather
than a mode) of interpretation” (original
emphasis) (Dal Fovo & Niemants, 2015, p. 1, based on Falbo, 2013).
The term “community interpreting (CI)” is used
throughout this issue. Despite its past connotation associated with ad hoc,
unpaid interpreters (Hale, 2007, p. 28), in our view, this term best captures the
solid link between the activity and the contexts in which it takes place and is
therefore most suited to this thematic issue focusing on context. Moreover,
this term can also be applied to non-professional interpreting (NPI) in the
community, which has emerged as an important research field in interpreting
studies (IS) (Antonini et al., 2017). Finally, the term “CI” is also used in the
formal ISO standard 13611 “Guidelines for community interpreting”.
A definition that accurately accommodates the wide
range of CI activities is that provided by Remael and Carroll (2015):
[…] any form of bi-directional dialogue interpreting,
implicating a triadic constellation with a client or clients, one or more
end-users, and an interpreter. The dialogue may be in community, legal or
public service settings and will involve the transfer of signed, and/or verbal
and non-verbal messages in real time. (p. 2)
In spite of the strong link between CI and the
contexts in which it takes place, the concept of context has rarely been recognized
or defined explicitly to date. As Baker (2006) points out, “the notion of
context has been extensively invoked but rarely critiqued and elaborated in the
study of translation and interpreting” (p. 321). In the domain of CI, context
seems to be treated rather as an inherent part of the interpreted event than as
a research topic in its own right. However, as Goodwin and Duranti (1992, p. 2)
argue, in spite of the lack of a clear definition of what context actually
represents in linguistics, the fact that so many researchers recognize its
importance and are “actively involved in trying to unravel how it works” shows
precisely why it provides such a fruitful ground for research by linguists at
large. Despite this recognition, in-depth studies of context are relatively
recent in the field of IS. Therefore, as editors of this thematic issue, we
considered it high time to take stock of what context means for research,
practice and training, specifically with regard to research on CI.
As researchers have argued, the context in which CI occurs places certain constraints on the activity
(Pöchhacker, 2016, p. 160). Moreover, since interpreter-mediated communication
involves participants from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, the
ways in which context is understood by the different participants in the
interpreting process may also vary significantly (Vargas Urpi, 2012). This
applies as much to spoken-language as to sign-language interpreting, because
both involve users demonstrating wide sociolinguistic diversity (Napier et al.,
2018).
Within the specific frameworks surrounding their
activities, community interpreters draw on contextual cues to make sense of and
maintain the continuity of communicative exchanges (Hatim & Mason, 1997, p.
42). In fact, the very interactional nature of interpreter-mediated
communication renders it simply impossible to decontextualize this type of
exchange (Wadensjö, 1998). Since in CI meaning is co-constructed by all the participants,
in continuous negotiation with the direct discourse environment, interpreters are
not only influenced by context, but also contribute to the ways in which the context
develops (Mason & Ren, 2012). In other words, context and contextualization
are an inherent part of the interpretation process (Janzen & Shaffer,
2008).
At the same time, CI itself is defined by the larger
political and socio-economic context of the country in which it takes place.
This has far-reaching consequences for the ways in which CI is organized (or
not) at a national level (see Section 3). Moreover, contexts are by no means
static but are subject to rapid changes, as demonstrated by the worldwide
developments towards the spread of a global language. Apart from that, the movement
of goods, services and people make our societies increasingly multilingual and
multicultural. As Monzó-Nebot and Wallace (2020,) point out,
the essential role of interpreting and translation in
today’s world is evident in the ubiquitous demand for these services, in the
efforts and resources invested in developing faster and more accessible
communication solutions, and in the frequency with which individuals with
relevant linguistic knowledge are asked to interpret or translate in a myriad
of different intercultural contexts. (p. 1)
As a result, the role of interpreters and interpreting
is continually in need of redefinition and analysis (Pöchhacker, 2016, p. 217;
Schäffner et al., 2013, p. 3).
Against this backdrop, this thematic issue focuses on
the impact of context in CI in its diverse dimensions. Its contributions[i] investigate
the ways in which context is taken into account in interpreting research,
practice and training. Most of the contributions collected here result from
papers presented at the In Dialog 3 conference, which took place from 21 to 22
November 2019 and was hosted
jointly by the University of Antwerp and KU Leuven Antwerp campus (to
which the three guest editors are affiliated) under the auspices of
ENPSIT (European Network for Public
Service Interpreting and Translation). Authors were invited to share their
findings on the impact of the varied and diversifying contexts in which
interpreters work, especially in under-researched areas such as interpreting
for refugees or for vulnerable groups, sensitive contexts and other possible
socially and emotionally challenging settings.
Before introducing the collection of selected contributions
to this issue, we would like to place them in a larger conceptual perspective. This
is not meant to be a comprehensive overview of all the research on CI that
touches upon context in its various settings; rather, its intention is to explore
some pertinent theoretical aspects of the concept of context in CI research.
In what follows, we first investigate the notion of
context in general (Section 2) and then discuss the different levels of context
in research and training in CI by considering context first in a wide sense and
then in a narrower sense (Section 3). This is followed by a chronological overview
of this thematic issue’s contributions (Section 4) and some concluding remarks
(Section 5).
2. The concept of context
Ever since the first studies that marked the beginning
of academic investigation of interpreting, the notion of context has been a
central point of interest. These early interpreting theories attempted to
explain the ways in which interpreters draw on their contextual, situational
and encyclopaedic knowledge to understand meaning (Pöchhacker, 2016, p. 115).
For example, La théorie du sens
(Interpretive Theory of Translation), developed by Seleskovitch and Lederer
between 1974 and 1984 within the “Paris School” (Pöchhacker, 2016, p. 36), considered
context as essential to extracting meaning in the interpreting process. It started
from the idea that interpreters make sense of a source-text message by
combining perceptual input with prior knowledge of the situational context, the
subject-matter and the languages involved (Pöchhacker, 2016, p. 59). Other early
interpreting scholars such as Moser-Mercer (e.g., Moser, 1978) also
acknowledged the importance of context. Moser took contextual knowledge (and
cognition) into account in her models to map the interpreting process by means
of an interdisciplinary approach based on cognitive psychology (Pöchhacker,
2016, p. 39). In this research, the notion of context generally referred to the
situational context.
The first interpreting theories were generally applied
to the study of types of monologic interpreting, that is, interpreter-mediated
events in which the primary participants are speakers and their audiences, such
as conference situations or formalized meetings (Braun, 2006, p. 3). In
research on these types of interpreter-mediated events, socio-institutional
aspects originally seemed to be a less important theme compared to the research
on CI events. As a result of the previously one-sided attention paid by researchers
of interpreting to monologic types of interpreting, academic work on the social
and situational constellations of interaction in CI arrived relatively late
(Pöchhacker, 2016, pp. 131–132). This newly developed interest was also
prompted by increasing immigration flows into Western Europe during the 1980s,
which led to a growing need for the services of interpreters in public-service
areas. Accordingly, the role of interpreters in interactions became much more
prominent than in conference interpreting, because of “the variety and unique
nature of public service settings”, which “pose more challenges for
interpreters” (Schäffner et al., 2013, pp. 3–4).
Since then, the extent of conference interpreting in
research has shrunk or shifted, to the advantage of the more recently
discovered domain of CI (Gile, 2006). Together with this shift, which can be ascribed
to a “social turn” in translation studies more generally (Pöchhacker, 2016; Straniero
Sergio & Falbo, 2012, p. 28), the notion of context has gained in importance
and its study has been extended from a rather narrow view of the role of situational
knowledge and cognition in extracting meaning to a much broader approach. In this
more holistic conceptualization of context, researchers aim to understand the
complex socio-institutional framework that encompasses interpreting events, in
addition to its impact on the interpreting process and the participants
involved.
The increased interest in the highly complex
situational context of CI made use of developments in sociology and linguistics
spearheaded by, for example, Goodwin (1981), Gumperz (1982) and Van Dijk (1997)
that investigated language as a situated discourse. In this theorization, talk
and context are considered to “shape each other as part of an emergent process
that changes through time and space” (Cicourel, 1992, p. 291). The first researchers
of interpreting in the area of CI (e.g., Roy, 2000; Wadensjö, 1998) turned to sociological
and sociolinguistic theory and methodology (conversation analysis in
particular) to investigate social organization in CI (see Section 4).
For some time, context has been a key concept in
pragmatics and ethnographically oriented studies. In these studies, conducted
from the 1980s, context has increasingly been conceived of as an interactive
and dialogically achieved phenomenon (Goodwin & Duranti, 1992, p. 1). As
Baker (2006, p. 333) argues, in both linguistics and translation and IS, the
conceptualization of context has moved from a rather static to a more dynamic
approach. In the static approach, elements defining context are often
considered as static phenomena existing in a relatively stable environment,
whereas the dynamic approach emphasizes the fluidity and co-constructive
character of context and the interaction embedded in it (Baker, 2006, p. 325).
This is the approach that dominates the current state of the art in both sociolinguistics
and IS.
In the case of sociolinguistics, Cicourel (1992) describes
two senses of context. First, there is the institutionalized framing of
activities, which is defined as
[…] group-derived prescriptive norms that pressure
and/or channel people with designated titles, presumed competencies, duties or responsibilities
into certain physical spaces at certain times in order to engage in a finite
number of specifiable activities. (pp. 294–295)
Second, within this framing of activities, there is
the locally organized and negotiated interaction, which is the narrower view of
context. Cicourel (1992, p. 307) also argues that the topic of local (i.e., narrow)
context must be discussed in relation to cultural and institutional
constraints, expectations and conditions in which the local communicative
events unfold. In this way, “the local, mutual shaping of talk and context” can
be placed within a larger framework “that incorporates structural and
processual aspects” of social interaction (Cicourel, 1992, p. 307). Goodwin and
Duranti (1992, pp. 3–5) make the same distinction between a broad and a narrow
conceptualization of context, namely, between a “focal event” and a “field of
action”. The focal event is the phenomenon that is being contextualized and is embedded
in the field of action, which can be considered to be its “background”. Both
dimensions mutually inform each other and are highly dynamic. Following this
same line of thought, different dimensions of context are applied to study the
various micro-organizational levels of conversation (Gumperz, 1982; Kendon,
1982). For example, in a focal event, the verbal and the non-verbal levels can
provide a context for each other in the sense that one can create a context for
the other in order to be interpreted appropriately (Goodwin, 1981, 2003). This
idea was developed further in multimodal theory – for example, by Mondada
(2016, p. 342), who claims that language and body movement are deeply embedded
in the specific ecology of activities, “including the way it materializes the
socio-institutional context” (see Section 3.3).
The notions of context originating from sociology and sociolinguistics
discussed above correspond to the ways in which the context of CI is treated in
IS. Pöchhacker (2016, p. 160) distinguishes three levels of enquiry, that is,
macro, meso and micro. Some studies have examined the socio-cultural features
of professional interpreting and NPI in the context of society at large (macro
level), whereas others have focused on particular settings of CI (meso level).
Yet other research has investigated actual interpreting events to better
understand the interactional and/or cognitive aspects of interpreting (micro
level). Of course, these levels are not clear-cut, but mutually inform one another.
For example, the interactional models used to investigate CI are designed to
identify communicative relationships between the participants at a micro level,
which are in turn determined by the larger social, professional, institutional
and cultural framework in which communication is embedded at a macro level. In this
article, we follow Kozin (2018), who considers context as it relates to its two
main components, namely, (a) “the source of the conditions for the existence of
interaction” and (b) “its (local) treatment by the participants” (p. 149). The
former represents the macro/meso level, consisting of the geographical and socio-institutional
context; the latter refers to the direct interactional context. Although,
obviously, all three layers are inherently intertwined, research generally
focuses on either the macro and meso levels or the micro level of interaction.
Therefore, for pragmatic reasons, we consider here the broader layers at the
same time in the next section (Section 3), which describes the ways in which CI
research deals with the different implications of context, ranging from the macro
to the meso level. After that, research on CI as a micro-level interaction will
be described separately (Section 4).
3. From macro to micro level: geographical, socio-institutional and
interactional contexts
At the macro level of context, it is important to
realize that the ways in which CI is organized – or not – at a national level are predominantly a socio-economic and therefore a
political matter. This explains the great differences in the organization of CI
between countries and regions. However, the role defined for community
interpreters also has an influence on the narrower interactional context. This
section expands on the implications of the geographical, socio-institutional
and interactional aspects of context for the ways in which CI unfolds in
practice and in research and how interpreter training responds to this.
3.1 Geographical context
We consider geographical areas
as macro contexts that influence both the interpreting profession at large and
interpreter training in a very broad way. The differences between European
countries alone are substantial; they are even more disparate in the
non-Western world. Indicative of this reality is the fact that in the Routledge
Encyclopedia of Interpreting Studies (2015) some geographical areas have received
an entry whereas others have not. This presence
and/or absence of geographical areas constitutes an interesting finding in
itself, because it tells us something about the importance of the macro context.
For instance, although lemmas such as China and Africa are present in
the Encyclopedia, it cannot be denied that these very large areas are
either under-researched or the research they generate is disseminated less.
Moreover, the research that has been carried out there is also less well known
compared with that relating to other continents such as Europe, North America (Canada
and the USA) and Australia. However, next to Africa, only Australia constitutes
a headword, because of its capacity to have accepted several waves of
immigration since its colonization by the British in the late 18th century and
to have adopted a range of pro-immigrant policies, from assimilation to
integration to multiculturalism (Gentile, 2015, p. 27). This growing awareness
of the fact that people do not assimilate easily led Australia to become a pioneer
of both “telephone interpreting” and “CI” at the beginning of the 1970s
(Gentile, 2015, p. 27).
The headword China, in contrast,
mainly describes this geographical zone as one that has known an “exponential
growth in interpreter training institutes” only since the 1980s, thanks largely
to a slowly growing awareness “that someone with foreign language competence
does not necessarily make a professional interpreter” (Lung, 2015). What is indicated
as a closely related conceptual link in the Encyclopedia is the lemma “Korea”
(Nam Hui, 2015), which is entirely dedicated to the history of Korea’s foreign
relations and interpreting officials. Historical overviews are also a thread
through the entries on Egypt (Mairs, 2015), Russia (Burlyay et al., 2015),
Canada (Delisle, 2015), and, somewhat surprisingly, Spain, as the only European
country (Baigorri-Jalón, 2015). This selection seems to represent the
randomness of geographical factors when we refer to interpreting in context.
Finally, the entry concerning Africa
is dedicated to the history of interpreting in the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial
eras, with a focus on South Africa, since simultaneous interpreting was
introduced there during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings (TRC) between
1996 and 1998 (Wallmach, 2015). Moreover, it is important to stress that, as in
the case of Africa, most headwords confirm what Pöchhacker (2000) has described
in terms of status as either “First World” interpreting (the canonized form of
interpreting that sets norms and standards) or “Third World” interpreting, which
is more closely represented by CI.
As far as geographical context
is concerned, our special issue was unfortunately not able to reverse
persistent trends.[ii] This
thematic issue represents the “usual” geographical areas in Europe (with three
contributions, from Austria, Belgium and Scotland), the USA (four contributions)
and Australia (one contribution). The less usual areas (with less-developed interpreting
(studies)) are represented by Turkey, Lebanon and China. However, as will be
shown in what follows, within the broader geographical contexts mentioned above,
we have been able to select contributions that cover less usual CI contexts at both
the meso scale and the micro scale.
3.2 Socio-institutional context
As was mentioned in the beginning of this section, in
the larger geographical contexts, political decisions are the basis for local
CI policies. As Pöchhacker (2016) states, what often happens is that the
interpreting of “personal communication of foreign language citizens within
social institutions lacks a solid foundation in public policy” (p. 220). In
some countries, the insistence by certain political parties on prioritizing the
use of the national language – despite a clear lack of opportunities for
newcomers to master it – has led to budget cuts, resulting in severe reductions
in professional CI services. In other countries and regions, CI has not yet
emerged as a profession at all (Pöchhacker, 2016, p. 220). In yet others, legal
provisions are put in place to secure access for visually impaired and hearing-impaired
communities to public services, whereas no such regulations exist for
foreign-language citizens. Owing to “the strong local societal roots and the
lack of cross-border standards” (Remael & Carroll, 2015, p. 1), there is a dearth
of uniform policies in CI.
Moreover, in countries where CI is provided
professionally, the rapidly changing “linguascape” (Monzó-Nebot & Wallace,
2020, p. 1) has placed training programmes, codes of conduct and the budgets
available for interpreting and translation services under pressure. This has been
reinforced by the emergence of NPI, for example by friends, family members or
bilingual personnel. Although NPI has always existed as a practice, interest in
NPI as a research topic has boomed in recent years, especially since the
publication of the seminal work by Antonini et al. in 2017, which provided a
state-of-the-art account of NPI and its future directions. Within NPI, the sub-domain
of child language brokering (CLB) has also gained the interest of CI
researchers (Orellana, 2017; Weisskirch, 2007). CLB can take place in all kinds
of setting in CI, such as among linguistic minority groups and signing
communities (Antonini, 2015, p. 48). Studies on NPI range from examinations of
structural conditions to individual performances and generally aim to clarify the
ways in which societies treat NPI and may, in this way, influence CI policies.
Closely connected to the
socio-institutional level is the issue of interpreter ethics. As Vargas Urpi (2012, p. 54) points out, apart
from the linguistic differences between the people supplying public or
community services and those needing them, the sheer variety of socio-institutional
contexts also implies differences in the role that is ethically and socially
expected of the interpreter in CI. Whereas the ethical aspects of NPI still
require further systematic examination (Monzó-Nebot & Wallace, 2020, pp. 2–3), in professional CI research ethics has been
investigated extensively (see Phelan et al., 2020). The study of ethics in CI
generally relates to both the role of the interpreter and the context in which
the interpreting event is embedded, which is frequently invoked as a
constraint. As Pöchhacker
(2016) explains, the constraints placed on legal interpreters often do not
correspond to the standards promoted by the interpreting profession and
training programmes; this has the effect of
leaving a gap between unrealistic institutional
demands for “verbatim translation” by “invisible” interpreters on the one hand
and the widespread lack of specific training and commonly accepted performance
standards for judicial interpreters on the other. (pp. 161–162)
Other research confirms that there is often friction
between actual CI practice and the norms governing the interpreter’s role as
prescribed by professional codes (Inghilleri, 2013; Ng & Crezee, 2020, p. 2).
One of the typical rules in professional codes stipulates that interpreters are
not allowed to omit, adapt or add information when interpreting a message from
one person to another. This principle can be put under pressure when it makes
it difficult for interpreters to pass on and clarify cultural aspects of the
information that are crucial to facilitating mutual understanding between the
conversational partners in the interpreted event.
In healthcare interpreting settings, such as hospitals and mental healthcare
institutions, similar constraints of context have been demonstrated by
discourse-based and ethnographic studies (e.g., Angelelli, 2004; Bolden, 2000;
Davidson, 2002, in Pöchhacker, 2016, p. 162). As Kaufert and Putsch (1997)
remarked, when there is a potential risk of communication breakdown,
interpreters have agency, that is, the
ability to produce and initiate actions (Pirini, 2017) and to be prompted to make individual, strategic
choices. In other words, interpreters may intervene and temporarily deviate
from the path prescribed by their professional codes. However, the degree of
agency that interpreters allow themselves and which is determined by the
context differs from one situation to the next, which means that broad
normative statements on interpreter conduct may not be very relevant (Kermit,
2020). As several contributions in this issue illustrate, interpreters’ agency
is a highly debated topic in current studies on CI, especially regarding
sensitive contexts (Moreno-Bello; Contreras-Nourse, this issue).
Another matter in CI research
that has a strong link to the socio-institutional context and concerns all settings
of CI (both professional and non-professional) is the power relationships between the participants involved
in CI events. As Cho (2021) argues, “power is central to interpreting, where
interactions occur between individuals who hold dominant forms of linguistic
and cultural capital, and individuals who do not” (p. 4). These characteristics
influence the ways in which interpreter-mediated interaction unfolds in these
settings. The parameters defined by Alexieva (1997/2002) relating to
socio-situational context (mode of delivery
and production, participants, topic, spatial and temporal constraints and goal
of the event) are still
highly relevant to the practice of CI. Among other things, these parameters
indicate not only distance and proximity between the participants but also aspects
of their relationship such as equality, cooperativeness and shared goals.
As Lindstrom (1992, p. 102) points out, context is not a neutral given
but a “field of power” that determines participants’ roles and discourse. Hale (2007,
p. 17) emphasizes how important it is for interpreters to be aware of these
power relationships, which she refers to as “discourse-external” knowledge that
can help to minimize potential sources of misunderstanding. Discourse-external
knowledge consists – among other things – of understanding
the roles of each participant in the discourse process and also the context of
the situation and the setting (Hale, 2007, p. 17). Regarding this, combined
situated learning across different disciplines is one possible way to construct
knowledge in professional fields, as was explored by Kadrić et al. and
Hlavac and Saunders in this issue.
However, according to Inghilleri (2007, 2013), awareness of power
relationships applies not only to professional contexts, but also to the
discourse that expresses these relationships. For example, in asylum settings the
discourse is subject to “the tension between a more scholarly appeal to a more
international discourse of human rights and the public discourses in which
established relationships are maintained” (Inghilleri, 2007, p. 196). Interpreters
may help to “sustain or contest” these relationships and, through their
intervention, play a pivotal role in contributing (or not) to the development
of a global society (Inghilleri, 2007, p. 210).
Of course, the manner in which the role of the
interpreter and the relationships between participants unfold depends greatly
on the type of CI setting. As several researchers (Hale, 2007; Ng & Crezee,
2020; Pöchhacker, 2016; Vargas Urpi, 2012) have pointed out, the most
frequently researched settings continue to be the legal and healthcare domains (for
an overview of this research, see Ng & Crezee, 2020). However, within these
wider settings, the CI field has clearly diversified over time, partly due to the
rise of NPI as a specific research domain. This diversification is also
expressed in the rise of highly specialized CI domains such as palliative care
(see Contreras-Nourse, this issue) and interpreting for unaccompanied migrant
children (see Sultanic, this issue). As Monzó-Nebot and Wallace (2020, p. 3)
explain, research in these more “peripheral” contexts based on “previously
unavailable sources and data” has shed light on more established forms of
interpreting by “transforming both our knowledge and our methods”.
Other initially less usual settings
include military
interpreting and interpreting in conflict and war contexts such as refugee
camps and cross-border investigations (for a state-of-the-art approach, see Gehrmann
& Laugesen, 2020; Ruiz Rosendo & Persaud, 2016). One of the major
issues explored in this branch of research is the lack of a legal framework in
which interpreters operate in war zones. As Albakaa (2020, p. 248) points out, clearer
regulations are needed in military policies to protect interpreters,
translators and linguists. This is also demonstrated by the current situation
(2021) in Afghanistan, where local interpreters who have been left behind and
were formerly employed by Western forces are now fearing for their lives. Studies
on interpreting in time of war reveal that interpreters are often positioned on
the margins of their own social environment (Gehrmann & Laugesen, 2020, p.
259) and are caught between two cultures, which leads to their feeling pressured
from all sides (Albakaa, 2020; Hoedemaekers & Soeters, 2009, p. 348). Local
interpreters in particular face the challenge of identifying with their “own”
people as well as with the officials from the foreign army that employs them
(Gehrmann & Laugesen, 2020, p. 260). The complexity of the interpreter’s
role when mediating between foreign armies and the local population is also
invoked by Moreno-Bello (this issue) in her analysis of interpreters’ agency
in peacekeeping missions in Lebanon. Following Moser-Mercer et al. (2014) and in line with Todorova (2020),
Moreno-Bello stresses the importance of training to enhance the quality of and the
ethical decision-making in this type of context.
The importance
of training is dealt with in various contexts of CI. An example of this is the
development of interprofessional education (IPE),
which is gaining ground as a pedagogical model that brings the collaborative
dimensions of interpreting to the fore. Bringing trainees – and therefor future
professionals – together in IPE is gaining ground in CI settings – for
instance, in medical contexts (Krystallidou et al., 2017) and in legal contexts
(Balogh et al., 2018). Examples of IPE can also be found in Kadrić et al in
this issue, in a legal context, and in the contributions by Hlavac and Saunders
dealing with social welfare settings. These authors also report on the positive
feedback about their learning curves given by the participants in IPE training
sessions.
The way in which knowledge construction may effectively
influence the interpreter’s decision-making process is something that takes
place at the micro level or in the interactional context of CI, which is
discussed in the next subsection.
3.3 Interactional context
The interactional level of enquiry deals with the
direct “social context and situational setting” of CI (Pöchhacker, 2016, p.
26). In studies relating to context in a narrower sense, “dialogic
discourse-based interactionist” studies, also referred to as the “DI paradigm” (Pöchhacker,
2016, p. 75), have come to dominate the research field. In this research
paradigm, context is often considered as being based on interaction. As Dal
Fovo and Niemants (2015) suggest, the DI paradigm brought innovation to IS through
“the interest in interaction and the interactionally constructed context as the
main factors affecting DI [dialogue interpreting]” (p. 1).
One of the key concepts directly related to context in
this sense is the notion of “contextualization cues”, introduced by linguistic anthropologist
Gumperz (1982, p. 131). A contextualization cue is “any feature of linguistic
form that contributes to the signalling of contextual presuppositions” between
speakers and listeners, ranging from “verbal and non-verbal signs to relate
what is said at any one time and in any one place to knowledge acquired through
past experience, in order to […] assess what is intended’’ (Gumperz, 1992, p. 230).
This is achieved through the use of prosody, paralinguistic signs, code choice
(related to linguistic repertoire) and choice of lexical forms or expressions (Gumperz,
1992, p. 231). As far as contextualization is concerned, Gumperz also
emphasizes that inference of meaning also depends on sequencing (i.e., the position
of a certain segment of meaning in other segments), an essential assumption of
conversation analysis (CA) (Sacks et al., 1974). This interactional approach to
context, including Goffman’s (1981) notion of participation frameworks, has been
followed by many CI researchers over the past two or so decades, starting with early
IS researchers such as Davidson (2000), Metzger (1995), Roy (2000), Tebble
(1993) and Wadensjö (1998). These IS pioneers inspired whole generations of CI
researchers such as Baraldi and Gavioli (2012), Bot (2005), Cirillo (2010),
Merlini and Favaron (2005) and Valero-Garcés (2005).
Based on this research paradigm, more recent CI
studies (e.g., Biagini et al., 2017; Davitti, 2013, 2018; Davitti &
Pasquandrea, 2017; Krystallidou, 2014; Mason, 2012; Monteoliva-García, 2020;
Pasquandrea, 2011; Theys et al., this volume; Vranjes, 2018) have turned to
multimodal theory to zoom in on specific embodied aspects of CI. Multimodality
refers to “interaction in which participants encounter a steady stream of
meaningful facial expressions, gestures, body postures, head movements, words,
grammatical constructions, and prosodic contours” (Stivers & Sidnell, 2005,
p. 2). In fact, multimodal studies investigate Gumperz’s (1981)
contextualization cues through a microscopic lens and consider language as just
one among the many resources used for meaning-making, alongside other semiotic
resources such as gaze, gesture and the handling of artefacts. In multimodal
theory, no resources are prioritized over others (Norris, 2004).
In recent studies of CI that have been applying a
multimodal research framework, the introduction of technology-mediated research
methods such as mobile eye-tracking (see, e.g., Vranjes, 2018) has led to extremely
fine-grained accounts of the role of gaze, gesture, body posture, proxemics, the handling of artefacts and spatial
arrangement in interaction (Davitti & Pasquandrea, 2017). Many of these studies also examine the collaborative
dimensions of the interactional context (Tipton & Furmanek, 2016), namely,
how participants, including the interpreter, coordinate their actions to
regulate turn-taking and negotiate meaning (Pasquandrea, 2011).
Micro-level investigations of CI (whether or not they use multimodal
methodology) are typically based on video recordings of interactions (for an
overview, see Salaets & Brône, 2020). These have proved useful in
investigating the impact of the situational and, often, technological
environment of interpreted events across various settings. For instance, remote
interpreting in the form of telephone interpreting and video-mediated
interpreting has been demonstrated to have an impact on the micro-interactional
context of CI events (e.g., Amato & Spinolo, 2018; De Boe, 2020; Hansen,
2020; Licoppe & Verdier, 2013; Vranjes, 2018). The impact of the use of
remote interpreting methods is not only the result of the technological
conditions themselves (such as a delay in the transfer of sound and image or
bad sound quality) but also comes to the fore in the organization of the
physical and the virtual space, or its “ecologies”. As Hansen (2020, p. 1)
demonstrates in her research on video remote interpreting in authentic
healthcare settings, participants often neglect to organize their visual
ecologies in such a way that all the participants have visual access to one another.
This frequently results in turn-taking issues. Moreover, as Licoppe and Verdier
(2013, p. 269) point out, when a video link is used to connect a courtroom and
a defendant, this results in the reshaping of the local courtroom ecology (i.e.,
the direct environment).
Although interpreters’ decision-making processes are largely shaped by
macro structures such as professional and institutional practices and by local
environmental factors, interpreters can still exercise a lower or higher degree
of agency in the local context of each interpreting event. As some
researchers argue, interpreters are endowed with “micro-power” that may be used
to “rebalance” existing power relationships in certain CI contexts (Cho, 2020,
p. 8).
Other important issues that are being researched at a micro level are
trust in healthcare (Hsieh & Kong, 2010), in asylum or legal settings for
minors (Balogh & Salaets, 2015; Maryns, 2006; Pöllabauer, 2004; Tipton,
2008) in sign language interpreting (Napier et al, 2020), and also in empathic
communication (see Theys et al., this issue), to name but a few. Theys et al.
investigate the interplay between different interactional levels in a micro
context in transferring empathy, which is an important factor in patients’
positive health outcomes and doctor–patient satisfaction (Kerasidou, 2020;
Yaseen & Foster, 2020).
Certainly, many more examples of micro-level studies across a variety of
CI settings exist. We have pinpointed only a few. In our discussion of the
different levels of context, we have attempted to illustrate, first, how the
study of context in CI constitutes a continuum ranging from macro to micro
contexts, and, second, how these levels interact and mutually shape one another.
The following section discusses the ways in which the contributions in this issue
fit into this continuum.
4. Contributions
The selected papers discussed below relate to a range
of different CI contexts. In what follows, we take a closer look at the
contributions in this issue, following the order in which they are published
while indicating the rationale behind the proposed order in the discussion.
In “Contextual factors as an analytical tool:
Exploring collaboration and negotiation in non-professional
interpreter-mediated mental health interviews in prisons”, Aída Martínez-Gómez investigates interpreted events in
prisons, which can be considered a legal context (the post-trial context
of detention). However, since the interpreter-mediated encounters analysed here
concern mental health interviews, these are multi-layered because they are part
of a specific setting (mental health) within general healthcare. Moreover, the
encounters under investigation take place in a detention centre, which could be
defined as a community of its own or “a microcosm of wider society” (Howe,
2021). Because non-professional interpreters lack exposure to setting-based
norms (in training, for instance), Martínez-Gómez proposes a new framework to
analyse the collaboration and negotiation processes in these constellations. First,
two analytical models, namely, Alexieva’s (1997/2002) multi-parameter approach
(see also Section 3), which accounts for the diversity of interpreter-mediated
settings, and Angelelli’s (2004) model designed to compare conference
interpreting and CI (based on Hymes, 1974), are juxtaposed. Then the author
proposes a (non-exhaustive) list of individual contextual factors that may have
an impact on the interpreted interaction. Examples of such contextual factors
are the interpreter’s interpreting background in addition to environmental and
institutional constraints in the detention centre. In examining
interpreter-mediated communicative events through the lens of contextual
factors, Martínez-Gómez proposes a more granular view of these events.
Moreover, she wants to demonstrate how these factors become particularly
relevant as an analytical foundation in the study of contexts in which multiple
settings overlap (see above). Since contextual factors also affect primary participants’
behaviours and reactions to the non-professional interpreters’ initiatives, the
author suggests that primary participants (in this case therapists) should be
informed about the ways in which contextual factors influence the mediated
constellation as a whole.
The research carried out by Mira Kadrić, Sylvi Rennert and Dalibor
Mikić is also situated in the (broad)
legal domain but aims at co-constructing knowledge through training, which is
in contrast to the fundamental lack in NPI in the previous contribution. In
their article “Connected education and co-construction of knowledge in a
joint course for law and interpreting students”, the authors rely on an
interdisciplinary approach through education sociology with a focus on one of
its core concepts: connectedness. As the title of the contribution indicates,
interpreting scholars and students perform their services while working together
in a legal setting that is presented through the lens of connectedness as “an
intrinsic part of higher education including connections between disciplines,
between research and teaching, between theory and practice, and between
academia and the wider society” (Barnett, 2016). Such connectedness is achieved
through an emerging didactic interdisciplinary method, namely IPE:
interprofessional education, in this case in law clinics (see also Hlavac and
Saunders, this issue). IPE is part of the university curriculum and involves
law students and interpreting students, who are guided by a professor of IS and
translation didactics with extensive expertise as a court interpreter, on the
one hand, and a professor of criminology with experience in criminal matters,
on the other. One dimension of connected learning – namely, socio-communicative
teaching and learning – was put into practice through role-plays, for the
reason that enactment as a tool for subsequent good practice has gained ground over
the past decade (Bahadir, 2009, 2010; Balogh et al., 2018; Hlavac &
Saunders, this issue; Kadrić, 2014). The proposed method of connected
learning allows those involved to co-construct knowledge, build relationships
and promote cooperation among students across fields of study.
Whereas Kadrić et
al. unravel a concrete example of situated learning, Claudia Angelelli and Jonathan Ross examine the situated practice of telephone
interpreting in “Diversity in telephone interpreting: Voices from healthcare
interpreters in Scotland”. Their research highlights the value of focus groups
to explore the diversity of this common CI practice. Although the practice of
telephone interpreting was set up as early as 1973 in Australia, with its
Emergency Telephone Interpreter Service (Gentile, 2015, pp. 28–29), telephone as a technology has known a significant evolution from
its ‘old’ wired version via its wireless version to the smartphones of today. Research
on telephone interpreting has undergone the same transformation: not only has
empirical research on telephone interpreting increased significantly, as
Angelelli and Ross illustrate, but the contexts in which telephone interpreting
is applied have also multiplied. Moreover, the research methods that are used
to investigate it have also changed, and they now range from experiments to
naturalistic observation in addition to surveys, interviews and focus groups to
enquire about end-users’ perspectives and, less frequently, about interpreters’
perspectives. In this contribution, the authors used focus groups to
investigate one of the most salient contextual features of telephone
interpreting: the lack of visual access. The authors show how the local context
of CI can be determined by technological matters, such as different
communicative configurations and the previously mentioned lack of visual
access, which may place constraints on the interpreter’s performance and
increase their stress level. The authors emphasize that a lack of training in
conventional training programmes in Scotland and elsewhere lies at the heart of
these issues.
The need for training is also central in Yolanda Moreno-Bello’s contribution, “Narratives in conflict
and the limits of the interpreter’s agency: A tool for training from the UN
Peacekeeping mission in Lebanon.” Since interpreters working in peacekeeping
missions are “caught between a series of – potentially – divergent narratives resulting
from in-group norms, genres, particularities and other cultural aspects in
relation to the context – such as west vs east, foreign vs local, and military
vs civilian” (Hoedemaekers & Soeters, 2009, p. 348), their position
possibly incorporates divergent narratives. This idea has led the author to
apply narrative theory to interpreters’ experiences in conflict zones to
scrutinize the concept of agency when mediating in such a complex situation.
Three levels of agency are considered: the first is when the interpreter does
not consider it necessary to mediate; the second when they ask permission to do
so; and the third occurs when they decide to mediate by adding an explanation
or altering the original message.
By examining the four narrative features that were
most loaded with the cultural interferences of the interpreter (“relationality”,
“particularity”, “genericness” and “normativeness”), precisely to define the
limits of agency of the “interpreter-mediator” in military deployment as a
genre, Moreno-Bello notes that interpreters showed more agency when they were
more aware of their role as mediators. The author therefore expresses the need
to encourage training in military contexts in order to empower interpreters and
enable them to discern the level of agency their interventions contain while at
the same time making them aware of the mediation process and its limitations.
The topic of agency
interconnects with what Duygu Çurum Duman discusses in her contribution
on healthcare interpreting in Turkish hospitals: “What do codes of ethics tell
us about impartiality and what is preferred at the hospital?”. Starting from the
available codes of ethics, she specifically raises the matter of healthcare
interpreters’ understanding of impartiality and their preferences and,
therefore, the limits of their agency. She does so through a hermeneutic
phenomenological approach by conducting a thematic analysis of two sets of
codes of ethics: one compiled by FIT Europe and another set of documents that
represents codes from states where the cultural mediation role is also relevant
(Belgium, France, Switzerland), compared to states that, through their pioneering
efforts, proclaimed the conduit model (Australia, Canada, USA). Next, interviews
on impartiality held with 27 healthcare interpreters are described. The code of
the Swiss professional association, INTERPRET (which fits into the second set
of documents), draws the author’s attention because it underlines “a multi-partial
attitude”, which means “keeping the same professional distance with each
interlocutor”. The accounts of the interpreters from Turkey then illustrate
that neutrality or impartiality is not their primary concern: in fact, helping
the patient through expressing empathy is their main motivation. Their own definition
of their role, which results from the duties and responsibilities they actually
perform (e.g., expert, patient guide), is shown to be at odds with adopting an
impartial position. The author concludes that the interpreters participating in
this study were closer to the active interpreter pole in Angelelli’s “neutral
to active” interpreter continuum. Regarding impartiality, this implies that
codes of conduct do not correspond to the reality of CI practice in healthcare
settings in Turkey. In her conclusion, Duman confirms the influence of the geographical
context on interpreted interaction (see Section 3). According to the author,
healthcare interpreting research and practice and a considerable increase in training
opportunities are the way forward to influence policy-making and the
professionalization of healthcare interpreting in Turkey.
As was illustrated in the
introduction, another “less usual” geographical location from which little
research on CI has reached the Western world so far is China. In “Visibility of
Chinese ad hoc medical interpreters through text ownership: A case study”, Wei Zhang and Cui Xu explore
Chinese ad hoc interpreters’ manifestations of visibility in authentic medical
interventions, based on Angelelli’s (2004) concept of “text ownership”. They do
this by relying on three case studies via field observation, audio recordings
and interviews. The findings demonstrate four main types of visibility:
·
replacing the interlocutor;
·
expressing affect towards patients;
·
exploring answers; and
·
brokering comprehension.
In addition, the authors detect
other forms of visibility that they define as “in between” and “unexplainable
by text ownership”. These include the omission of doctors’ or patients’ remarks
and small talk between doctor and interpreter. Interpreters’ heterogeneous
identities and their habitus formed in the process of socialization are
believed to influence their manipulation of medical discourses. The strength of
Zhang and Xu’s contribution lies in the fact that their study corroborates earlier
– and sometimes controversial – findings in Western contexts (e.g., Angelelli, 2004;
Downie, 2017; Ozolins, 2016) by concluding that ad hoc interpreters take on
various roles that go far beyond the linguistic aspects of the interpreting
task and that they frequently omit important content in doctor–patient
communication, despite the potential clinical risks of such omissions (e.g.,
Flores et al., 2012). These results are important because they demonstrate that
in contexts as culturally divergent as China and the Western world
non-professional interpreters display similar behaviours.
Another research method used
to describe the way interpreting goes far beyond its traditional linguistic
task is the close scrutiny of authentic interpreter-mediated consultations via video
recordings in the contribution of Laura Theys, Lise Nuyts, Peter Pype,
Willem Pype, Cornelia Wermuth and Demi Krystallidou. In “The Empathic Communication
Analytical Framework (ECAF): A multimodal perspective on emotional
communication in interpreter-mediated consultations”, they focus on empathic communication that can put
pressure on the co-construction of meaning by all the participants in the
encounter. For their investigation of complex doctor–patient–interpreter
interaction, they propose the ECAF tool. More concretely, they resort to
purposeful sampling of interpreter-mediated interactions according to the (most
common) language combinations in gynaecology, endocrinology, cardiology,
rheumatology and otolaryngology in a Belgian hospital and video recorded them.
The researchers claim that, to date, only two studies have focused on the
context of EC (empathic communication) in IMCs (interpreter-mediated
consultations) and studied the verbal and non-verbal aspects of the
interaction (Hofer, 2020; Lan, 2019; our emphasis). It is precisely the
combination of verbal and non-verbal actions that might compromise
participation in empathic interaction, hence the importance of video recordings
to observe embodied communication. The article in this issue presents a case
study conducted in the abovementioned authentic medical settings to show the
application of the ECAF tool the researchers created. It allows them to conduct
in-depth multimodal analysis and describe in detail how the participants
collaboratively perform verbal and non-verbal actions to achieve the
communicative goal of seeking and displaying empathy. Three distinct, yet
interconnected levels of analysis are performed: first, identifying instances
of EC; second, investigating participants’ verbal and non-verbal actions; third,
identifying awareness of the patients’ own actions or EC and those of others in
the context of EC through a semiotic density model. The three levels are
applied to an excerpt from a specific case showing the patient’s expressed
emotion, the interpreter’s rendering of it and the doctor’s response. The benefits
and limitations of the tool are then discussed, as is the use of the tool to
support the IPE of (apprentice) interpreters and (apprentice) healthcare
professionals to learn – in the context of EC – to be mindful
of both the verbal and the non-verbal components of triadic interactions.
Jim Hlavac and Bernadette Saunders also make a case for IPE in “Simulating
the context of interpreter-mediated social work interactions via
interprofessional education”, merging as they do the interdependent
professional contexts of social welfare and interpreting. Their article investigates
the effectiveness of IPE among interpreters and social workers by means of
pre-qualification training sessions involving learners from both disciplines.
The IPE sessions are designed with a view to enabling the participants to acquire
skills and knowledge of their own and the other group’s professions to
encourage more efficient collaboration between interpreters and social workers.
IPE – where the emphasis is not on the rote learning of content but on
understanding it, reflecting on it and applying it in context – is certainly
necessary, given the large number of social welfare settings in CI. Hlavac and
Saunders present a longitudinal study of IPE sessions over two years (2017–2019)
and their main purpose is also to assess its effectiveness. Respondents from both
groups (Master of Social Work and Master of Interpreting and Translation
Studies) believe that role-plays are very useful as an IPE activity to achieve
learning outcomes (see also Kadrić et al., this issue). They report
convincingly on increased knowledge about their own and the other professional
group and state that briefing beforehand and debriefing after an
interpreter-mediated event are useful. These are reasons enough to conclude
that, despite the considerable organizational and pedagogical investment, it is
worth the effort to broaden students’ knowledge and enhance their skills and, ultimately,
to prepare them better for collaborative and effective interaction with other
professional groups once they enter the profession.
In her paper “Decision-making in palliative care
interpreting”, Melissa Contreras-Nourse
dives into a very delicate and specific topic in healthcare, namely,
end-of-life care for children. She does so to explore the values medical
interpreters demonstrate in their decision-making process during a concrete
palliative care appointment. She reports on how in medical journals there seems
to be a clash between the fact that the interpreter is viewed as a mere conduit
and daily practice showing otherwise. The author formulates it as follows: “regardless
of the terminology used to describe this role [conduit], medical providers
appear to have an expectation that the interpreters will intervene when and if
such an occasion arose in a medical encounter”, but that at the same time they
are “unlikely to be aware of what the manifestation of such an intervention
would look like” (Contreras-Nourse, this issue). The author examines a specific
case to confirm the complexity of this statement using the context-based
decision-making model of Dean and Pollard (2018) combined with the four
biomedical ethics principles (respect for autonomy, non-maleficence,
beneficence and justice) that medical providers adhere to. Through audio
recordings, field notes, drawings of seating arrangements, post hoc summaries
and interviews with the interpreter and the palliative care team, the author
describes how medical interpreters use additions and omissions and how they are
“toggling between” the consecutive and the simultaneous mode while trying to
remain faithful to the values of this very specific context of paediatric
palliative care. In doing so, she highlights the usability of a values-based
decision-making scheme as a way of helping interpreters to make effective and
ethical decisions in this highly sensitive context. The fact that this research
was conducted from an interpreting scholar’s perspective makes it even more
valuable, considering that the existing research on the role of interpreters in
end-of-life contexts is mostly clinical.
Interpreting for children is also Indira Sultanic’s topic. She investigates the challenges
of interpreting for unaccompanied child migrants but concentrates on the effect
of exposure to the children’s traumatic narratives as perceived by the
interpreters in her article titled “Interpreting traumatic narratives of unaccompanied
child migrants in the United States: Effects, Challenges and Strategies”. Since
traumatic narratives can have an effect on the emotional and psychological
well-being of interpreters, the study investigates the coping mechanisms that interpreters
use to minimize the effect of long-term exposure to traumatic content. Based on
semi-structured interviews with both trained and ad hoc interpreters involved
in linguistic mediation for unaccompanied child migrants, the study sheds light
on the delicate nature of interpreting for vulnerable groups, especially
children. Moreover, it brings into focus appropriate strategies for preparing
for interpreting in the context of traumatic experiences, in addition to
interpreters’ coping strategies both during and after interpreting. Its
findings point to the need for interpreter-specific counselling as well as both
peer and professional support. The research also emphasizes that although
stress, vicarious trauma, compassion, fatigue and burnout are frequently considered
“occupational hazards” of CI, these problems need to be taken seriously. Moreover,
interpreters working in this sensitive context need additional professional
support to reinforce their coping strategies. In this way, the study not only offers
a unique insight into an under-researched context involving this extremely
vulnerable group of unaccompanied child migrants, but also draws attention to
the position and the viewpoint of the interpreters involved.
Finally, this special issue
concludes with “Reflection-in-action:
measuring ‘context’ in medical interpreting”, by Robyn K. Dean. She shares
with us the importance of detecting, recognizing and assessing context
(especially in a medical context), the central theme of this special issue. Dean’s
contribution presents an assessment tool that enables apprentice sign-language
interpreters to develop an understanding of context; this then strengthens their
future practice in healthcare contexts, given the importance of appreciating
nuances of context to effective interpreting practice. Dean (quoting Schön, 1987) passes
on the following interesting and concise metaphor that illustrates the
importance of context for the community interpreter:
As bedside
is to the provider, so is context to
the community interpreter. To a provider, the patient’s complaint or problem is
the fulcrum around which all investigations and ultimately treatment revolve.
To the community interpreter, it is the context (and the evolving context) that
impel all translation and behavioural decisions. In other words, no
practitioner, including community interpreters, works in the abstract but in
the, “messy indeterminate situations” of professional practice (p. 4).
Dean rightly argues that “teaching context in
community interpreting cannot be left to on-the-job acquisition and mere
implicit processes; it must be systematically and deliberately taught”. She subsequently
practices what she preaches by reviewing the use of videos of provider-patient
interactions for didactic purposes. Through reflective practice, Dean explains
how students analyse their practical knowledge using the videos of
provider-patient interactions to increase their proximity to the “bedside”,
which is more common for the provider than for the interpreter. This reflective practice is based on the Dean and Pollard (2011)
demand control schema, which establishes that context in CI emerges in the
communication event via four sources (environmental, interpersonal, paralinguistic
and intrapersonal). The
strength of this tool as a means of accessing the tacit knowledge of practitioners
is that it can be extended to spoken-language interpreting as well as to other
CI contexts besides healthcare.
5. Concluding remarks
This thematic
issue aims to provide a platform for scientific exchanges between interpreting
scholars and trainers investigating interpreting practice in the light of a
continuously changing world. In the process of examining the impact of context
on CI, general societal challenges posed by cultural diversity, inequality,
multilingualism and technological progress were given due consideration.
By investigating the
phenomenon of context, we have identified several challenges that lie ahead for
research in IS. Whereas research in legal and healthcare settings may
predominate, the variety of contexts that community interpreters are confronted
with is endless. In this issue, we have touched upon relatively unusual settings
within more usual contexts: interpreting in peacekeeping missions, non-professional
mental healthcare interpreting in prisons, and interpreting for minors in
asylum procedures and in specific niches in healthcare interpreting – for
example, end-of-life situations involving minors. This diversity of context
also implies a need for high degrees of specialization among community
interpreters, as was demonstrated, for example, by existing studies on
faith-related interpreting or educational interpreting (Tipton & Furmanek,
2016), which this issue has not been able to include but which are rapidly
emerging as research subjects.
In the light of the above, one
of the main challenges faced by IS is finding a balance between thorough explorations
of the impact of specific characteristics of highly specialized settings on
interpreted interaction, on the one hand, and feeding the acquired knowledge
back into practice and research in order to adjust broad and updated assumptions
about CI and interpreting in general, on the other. This is exactly what Martínez-Gómez proposes in
her contribution when she states that, in the growing field of IS it feels
somehow comfortable to divide the domain into subdisciplines, or, as in this
issue, into diverse settings or contexts. In the case of interpreting reality,
on the one hand, “setting-based differentiations may wash out differences
within one particular setting that could deepen our understanding of that
particular interpreting”, while, on the other hand, “focusing on specific
settings may also limit our ability to identify similarities across settings […]”
(Martínez-Gómez, this issue). In other words, by establishing parallels between the different settings and their
specific characteristics, CI can gain in importance as a research domain in its
own right.
Meanwhile, IS must continue
to deepen knowledge and encourage cross-fertilization by continuing to reach
out to relevant disciplines, including law, medicine and the social sciences,
particularly with regard to methodology. An example of this is the work by
Devaux (2017), who investigates video remote interpreting in courtroom settings
using Actor Network Theory. Within the social sciences, cognition in particular
has recently gained much in popularity among interpreting researchers – for
example, Englund Dimitrova and Tiselius (2016) and Tiselius and Albl-Mikasa
(2019). Cognition has been the exclusive playground of conference interpreting
researchers (e.g., Seeber, 2011) so far and is a domain yet to be fully
explored in CI contexts.
Other research subdomains of
CI that have not been covered in this issue but are expected to become
increasingly important in the coming years are those that are aimed at
promoting changes in society, in particular the equality of culturally and
linguistically diverse groups. Such research includes participatory action
research (e.g., Cornwall & Jewkes, 1995; Leung, 2020; Wurm & Napier,
2017) and social justice interpreting (Aguilar-Solano, 2021), based on a transformative research approach, that aim to de-marginalize
certain communities, such as women, culturally and linguistically diverse
groups, disabled people and other non-dominant cultural groups (Mertens, 2009),
and involve them in research.
To
round off, we would like to take the reader back to 1996, when CI was a research domain yet to be
developed. At that time, Mikkelson (1996) reported, in
the very first issue of the newly founded journal Interpreting, that CI was “the least prestigious and most misunderstood branch of the interpreting
profession” (p. 125). Whereas the first part of this observation unfortunately
still holds true to this day, its latter part can considered to be as good as
dismissed. Thanks to the knowledge generated over the past 25 years by research,
conferences and training, our understanding of CI, along with the dynamics
between CI practice and its various contexts, has greatly increased. As
interpreter researchers, practitioners and trainers we must continue to encourage
evidence-based studies and promote good practices in order to lift CI to the
high standard it deserves. Although, as Remael and Carroll (2015, p. 1) argue,
advances in research appear to be well ahead of progress in CI policies, the
fact that CI is so strongly rooted in
society also provides opportunities for its development. We need to
continue building partnerships within all the different settings of CI and
convince our partners to acknowledge the urgent need for CI as a basic human
right. Evidence-based research, combined with strong societal alliances, can enable
CI to (re)gain its place on the political agendas of local governments. It is
this macro context that has the greatest impact on the practice of CI and that
we believe is the most important context to change.
References
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Subversive
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[i] The papers
presented in this issue represent just under one-third of the abstracts that
were submitted for double-blind peer review. Owing to the highly unfortunate
conditions resulting from the outbreak of the worldwide pandemic in 2020, when
all of us struggled to keep things together both professionally and personally,
in the end, some papers could not be delivered. We sincerely regret this
situation and hope that this highly relevant research will still be completed
and published elsewhere. Fortunately, The
Interpreter’s Newsletter’s 26th issue (Dialogue Interpreting: Specific
communicative contexts and phenomena through specific analytical lenses, eds.
Natacha Niemants and Anne Delizée, soon to be published) offered another
opportunity for researchers to publish in the same research domain. At this
point, we would like to express our gratitude to all the authors and reviewers
who offered their time and effort so generously in these unusual and
troublesome times.
[ii] Out of 56 proposals, the “weaker” geographical areas mentioned in Section 3.1 were either hardly represented or did not pass the review procedure.