Elisabet Tiselius

Stockholm University | SU · Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism

Allocation and management of working memory resources are crucial for successful interpreting. A number of studies have found clear indications that simultaneous interpreters have larger working memory capacity, at least in some areas, than other bilinguals. To date, no studies have focused on the working memory of dialogue interpreters. The study...

This article explores how the interpreter professions in Sweden have been forged through different types of legislation and public actions. The study covers the period from 1971 to 2018 and investigates different public documents such as laws, bills, and special investigations in order to trace the development of the three interpreter professions,...

Table of contents, contributors, introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Conference Interpreting. Providing comprehensive coverage of both current research and practice in conference interpreting, The Routledge Handbook of Conference Interpreting covers core areas and cutting-edge developments, which have sprung up due to the spread of modern te...

This article discusses the concept of informed consent in interpreting studies. Informed consent implies that a person must be given enough information to be able to consent to participate voluntarily in a research project. The article first gives an overview and background of the origins of informed consent, and its place in ethical research. The...

This study addresses cognitive aspects of turn-taking and the role of experience in dialogue interpreting, by investigating the temporal and textual properties of the coupled turn (i.e. the original utterance and its interpretation). A comparison was made using a video-recorded scripted role-play between eight interpreters, with Swedish-French or S...

Providing comprehensive coverage of both current research and practice in conference interpreting, the Routledge Handbook of Conference Interpreting covers both core areas and cutting-edge developments, which have sprung up due to the spread of modern technologies and global English. Consisting of 40 chapters divided into seven parts: Fundamental...

Objective To investigate the reasons for not using interpreters to secure patient-safe communication. Methods Healthcare personnel at six paediatric oncology centres in Sweden responded to the Communication over Language Barriers questionnaire. Descriptive and comparative analyses were performed. Results The participants (n = 267) often cared for...

Integrated university programs for deaf and hearing sign language interpreting students are rare. In Finland, deaf interpreting students have been integrated in the only university program for sign language interpreting since its beginning in the early 2000s. This article investigates the experiences of the deaf interpreting students and deaf sign...

Previous studies have investigated the cognitive processes of simultaneous interpreting and translation using eye-tracking. No study has yet utilized eye-tracking to investigate cognitive load and cognitive effort in dialogue interpreting. An eye-tracking study was conducted on two groups of interpreters (experienced and inexperienced) with varying...

Retrospective verbal process tracing is a popular research method in Interpreting Studies, employed by a growing number of scholars, particularly in studies of conference interpreting, but, to date, it has not been widely employed in studies of dialogue interpreting. This paper begins by introducing process-tracing methodologies, defining types of...

Intercultural healthcare refers to when people of different cultures and languages communicate and interact in the healthcare context. Intercultural competence (also referred to as simply cultural competence) is crucial for providing culturally congruent and meaningful care. Such competence has been described as a process in healthcare interactions...

Language proficiency of dialogue interpreters, who typically work in the public service sector, is an under-researched area. Unlike as in the case of conference interpreters, there is no generally accepted definition of proficiency levels of working languages for dialogue interpreters. This article discusses language proficiency in dialogue interpr...

Introduction to the special thematic section on 'cognitive processes in dialogue interpreting' of Translation, Cognition & Behaviour 2/2, guest edited by Elisabet Tiselius and Michaela Albl-Mikasa.

Background: Healthcare personnel are responsible for providing patient-centered care regardless of their patients’ language skills, but language barriers is identified as the main hindrances providing effective, equitable and safe care to patients with limited proficiency in a country’s majority language. This study is a national multisite cross-se...

This article discusses different aspects of research ethics, the researcher’s voice and discretionary power in interpreting studies. Research ethics is laid down in international conventions, which in turn are reflected in national regulations and ethical vetting. Discretionary power is understood as the leeway for making conscientious decisions wi...

Sign language interpreting of dialogues shares many features with the interpreting of dialogues between non-signed languages. We argue that from a cognitive perspective in dialogue interpreting, despite some differences between the two types of interpreting, sign language interpreters use many of the same processes and handle similar challenges as...

Objective: To develop a valid and reliable questionnaire addressing the experiences of healthcare personnel of communicating over language barriers and using interpreters in paediatric healthcare. Methods: A multiple- methods approach to develop and evaluate the questionnaire, including focus groups, cognitive interviews, a pilot test and test-r...

Competence and expertise are used, in some writings in translation studies (TS), and indeed also in some dictionaries, as synonyms for each other. The PACTE group has made one of the most ambitious contributions to the definition and investigation of translation competence. PACTE lists five main competences: the bilingual sub-competence consisting...

This document describes the background, aims, proposed research questions, and activities so far, of a project, started in 2014, on the cognitive processes of the community interpreter.

Purpose: Children and families with a foreign background and limited Swedish proficiency have to communicate through interpreters in childhood cancer care centers in Sweden. Interpreter-mediated events deal with many difficulties that potentially hinder the transfer of information. The purpose of our study was to explore interpreters' experiences...

Students of public service interpreting come from a variety of backgrounds. A typical group of interpreting students includes a mix of students from different immigrant communities and from Norway’s majority population group, as well as students from varied educational backgrounds. Students have also had varying private and professional experiences...

Retrospection is one of the few research methods equally suitable for studying the processes involved in both translation and interpreting. At the first workshop on research methods in process-oriented research (Graz 2009), we presented the results of a pilot study of retrospection as a research method, published as Englund Dimitrova & Tiselius (20...

This dissertation investigates the process and product of interpreters with different levels of experience and explores the expertise approach (cf. Ericsson, Charness and Hoffman 2007) as applied to interpreters. The expertise approach claims that highly skilled performers, regardless of their chosen field, use the same type of strategies in order...

In this article, the performance of three simultaneous interpreters at interpreting school is compared both with their performance today and with other experienced interpreters. It is assumed that the three interpreters may be possible experts according to the expertise theory (Ericsson, Charness & Hoffman, 2007). However, the results in this study...

Deliberate practice (Ericsson 2007) is a type of focused, goal- oriented practice that is part of the process of developing expertise. A less explored area in interpreting research, deliberate practice is a construct that is not easily investigated using an experimental research design. This article reports on in-depth interviews with three interpr...

The expertise approach (Ericsson 2008) has been used to explore the competence of translators and interpreters since the mid-1990s, and is now a well established sub-field in translation and interpreting process research (Jääskeläinen 2010). In the area of interpreting, Ivanova (1999), Liu (2001) and others have explored the expertise approach. The...

The volume includes contributions on the cognitive processes underlying translation and interpreting, which represent innovative research with a methodological and empirical orientation. The methodological section offers an assessment/validation of different time lag measures; discusses the challenges of interpreting keystroke and eye-tracking data...

This paper investigates how conference interpreters with Swedish as A-language 1 working in international institutions understand the concept of expertise. Ten interpreters with Swedish mother tongue and working in the Swedish booth at the European institutions were interviewed in two focus groups (n=5) about their opinion of professional identity....

This pilot study describes the assessment of interpreting through the application of scales originally devised by Carroll (1966) for machine translation. Study participants (interpreters, n=6; non-interpreters, n=6) used Carroll’s scales to grade interpreted renditions (n=9) in simultaneous mode by conference interpreters with three different level...

This is an exploratory study of retrospection as a research method for investigating problems and strategies both in simultaneous interpreting and in translation. It is based on data from six subjects, three performing a translation task, three an interpreting task, with retrospection cued by the source text/source speech. In the coding of the retr...