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Simultaneous dialogue interpreting: Coordinating interaction in interpreter-mediated football press conferences
Abstract
Press conferences during major football tournaments are usually multilingual and interpreter-mediated. This paper draws on audio and video data from FOOTIE, a corpus of simultaneously interpreted football press conferences in which the interpreters worked either in booths in the conference room or in an adjacent room with a monitor in each booth. The aim of the paper is to show how the interpreters’ dialogue coordination activities emerge in mode-specific ways in simultaneous interpreting, as opposed to consecutive dialogue interpreting in face-to-face settings. In particular, the notion of simultaneous dialogue interpreting is proposed and its implications in terms of dialogue coordination are analysed on the basis of corpus data.
... In this study, we investigated the influence of speech-gesture asynchrony on the neural coupling of cross-lingual interlocutors in interpret-mediated communication with respect to mutual understanding and the skill of theory of mind. To this end, we designed two naturalistic DI conditions: the consecutive DI (time-delayed interpretation) and the simultaneous DI (time-aligned interpretation) (Sandrelli, 2017). We played the pre-recorded interpreted speech by the interpreter in consecutive DI to interlocutors simultaneously in simultaneous DI, pretending that the interpretation was performed by the interpreter in a booth because the interpreting quality of student interpreters in SI was inferior to that of those in consecutive interpreting (CI). ...
In everyday face-to-face communication, speakers use speech to transfer information and rely on co-occurring nonverbal cues, such as hand and facial gestures. The integration of speech and gestures facilitates both language comprehension and the skill of theory of mind. Consecutive dialogue interpreting (DI) allows dyads of different linguistic backgrounds to communicate with each another. The interpreter interprets after the interlocutor has finished a turn, so the interlocutor watches the gesture first and hears the target language a few seconds later, resulting in speech-gesture asynchrony. In this study, we used the functional near-infrared spectroscopy hyperscanning technique to investigate the influence of speech-gesture asynchrony on different levels of communication. Twenty groups were recruited for the DI experiments. The results showed that when the interpreter performed consecutive interpreting, the time-lagged neural coupling at the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) decreased compared to simultaneous interpreting. It suggests that speech-gesture asynchrony significantly weakened the ability of interlocutors to understand each other's mental state, and the decreased neural coupling was significantly correlated with the interpreter's interpretation skill. In addition, the time-aligned neural coupling at the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) increased, which suggests that, as compensation, the interlocutor's verbal working memory increases in line with the communication process.
... Examining television news interviews, Clayman (1992) demonstrated what he dubbed the "neutralistic" stance adopted by interviewers who shift their footing at some strategic points throughout the interview; for example, by embedding assertive and evaluative statements into questions, employing passive voice, or doing self-repair. Sandrelli (2017) investigated the footing shifts in audio and video data drawn from FOOTIE, a corpus of simultaneously interpreted football press conferences. Sandrelli found that such footing shifts, particularly those compared with the bilingual settings of face-to-face interpreting, showed that the interactants and their participation structure of the FOOTIE press conferences were highly complex (Sandrelli 2017:15). ...
This study seeks to examine the interface potentially holding between footing and the speech acts performed in the main Qurʼanic dialogue of Allah and Iblīs (Q15:32-43). The study utilizes a synthetic approach that combines two theoretical strands: (i) Erving Goffman's (1979, 1981) interaction model of footing as orchestrated by the speaker roles of animator, author, and principal; (ii) Searle's (1976) classification scheme of illocutionary acts and their felicity conditions. Crucially, the pragmatically enhanced footing analysis of the Qurʼanic speech event that binds Allah and Iblīs has demonstrated how the two participants perform illocutionary acts that determine their theologically felicitous speaker roles as animator, author, and/or principal. Five categories of illocutionary acts have been identified in the overall participation framework of the dialogue: expressives, directives, declarations, representatives, and commissives. Based on these categories, both Allah and Iblīs have performed acts as authors, whose utterances are animated via the reportorial style of the Qurʼanic text; further, the perlocutions of certain acts have manifested the discursive positions of each participant in a way that reflects his manipulating speaker role in the speech event.
... Yet, without doubt, technology presents interpreters with many new opportunities, most notably the increase need for multimodality (O'Sullivan, 2013;Perez-Gonzalez, 2014) and its expansion in newer domains like fansubbing, social media, public relations and journalism (Katan, 2001;Pöchhacker, 2011;Sandrelli, 2016). The rapid dissemination of information across media and across vast distances almost instantaneously means that global entities need to have access to the breaking news in key markets and not just in English. ...
The role of the professional interpreter, seemingly timeless and universal is to convey verbal communications from one language to another accurately, in confidence and with impartiality. These principles appear to have been valid since the dawn of cross-cultural and interlingual verbal communications. Why should technology have an impact on the professional role, which is both agreed by professional interpreters, and expected by clients? This paper outlines, through literature review, of both Sign and Spoken language settings, the development of the role of interpreters across different settings and the deontology for the interpreting profession over time. This is then superimposed with the effect of technology, both its facilitation and pressures on its practice. The result highlights the intersection between interpreting studies and technology away from curriculum development. Rather than adopting technology wholesale, practitioners and researchers ought to become more aware of this increasingly important aspect and take appropriate actions.Resumen: El papel del intérprete profesional, que pareciera ser eterno y universal, se basa en transmitir enunciados verbales de un idioma a otro de forma precisa, confidencial e imparcial. A estos principios se los ha considerado válidos desde los albores de la comunicación interlingüística e intercultural. ¿Por qué debería la tecnología impactar en un papel profesional sobre el que los intérpretes coinciden y que los clientes esperan? Mediante el análisis de publicaciones desarrolladas en el campo de las lenguas habladas y de la lengua de signos, este artículo intenta describir cómo evolucionan la función del intérprete en diferentes escenarios y la deontología de su profesión a lo largo del tiempo. A ello se le superponen posteriormente los efectos de la tecnología, tanto en la forma en la que esta facilita la práctica profesional como en las presiones que se generan de su uso. El resultado enfatiza la intersección entre los estudios en interpretación y tecnologías fuera del ámbito del desarrollo curricular. En lugar de adoptar la tecnología indiscriminadamente, los intérpretes y los investigadores quizá deberían prestar más atención a un aspecto de importancia creciente en la práctica profesional, así como adoptar medidas adecuadas.
As digital convergence marks the transition from print to screen culture, translation plays an increasingly important role of in the production and dissemination of the news. The translation of information in the news media is a pervasive set of practices that affects the daily consumption of the news and a topic of relevance to scholars in several areas of the humanities and the social sciences. This book provides a wide-ranging and accessible introduction to research in news media translation practices, products and processes, illustrating and discussing historical, theoretical and descriptive perspectives. Inter- and multi-disciplinary research spans fields such as Translation Studies, Linguistics, Journalism and Media Studies, and includes approaches from Critical Discourse Analysis and narrative theory to Systemic Functional Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics. The book also offers first-hand analyses of news texts in English and Italian, approaching news translation from an ethnomethodological perspective.
Press conferences during major football tournaments are usually multilingual and interpreter-mediated. This paper draws on audio and video data from FOOTIE, a corpus of simultaneously interpreted football press conferences held during the UEFA EURO 2008 football championships. The aim is to analyse the questioning and answering strategies employed by the press and the interviewees, and then investigate to what extent such dynamics were replicated in the interpreted version.
This paper explores data from remote interpreting (RI), which was originally generated with the aim of investigating and comparing the quality of the interpreting performance in onsite interpreting and RI in legal contexts. One unexpected finding of this comparison was that the number of additions and expansions was significantly higher in RI, and that it increased further after a phase of familiarisation and training for participating interpreters, calling for a qualitative exploration of the motives and functions of the additions and expansions. This requires an appropriate methodology. Whilst introspective data give insights into interpreting processes and motivations guiding the interpreter’s choices, they tend to be systematic and incomplete. Micro-analytical approaches such as Conversation Analysis are more promising, especially when enriched with social macro-variables. In line with this, the present paper has a dual aim. The primary aim is to explore the nature of additions and expansions in RI, especially to what extent they are indicative of interpreting problems, to what degree they are specific to the videoconference situation, what they reveal about, and how they affect the interpreter’s participation in RI. The secondary aim is to evaluate the micro-analytical approach chosen for this exploration.
Simultaneous interpreting is recognised to be an extremely complex cognitive activity placing high demands on linguistic abilities, extra-linguistic knowledge and communication skills of those who perform it. Specific difficulties identified in literature as the main factors contributing to the complexity of the interpreters' task include high information density, especially if combined with a high speed of talk and/or not well structured utterances, proper names, figures, culture-bound references, humorous, ironical or highly emotional passages, unfamiliar accents and pre-prepared speeches read out with no chance for the interpreter to have access to them. Simultaneous interpreting for live media ceremonies entails even more difficulties due to the peculiar features, structure and time constraints of the broadcast event. This study discusses simultaneous interpreting of two Academy Award Ceremonies - in 2000 and 2010 - focusing on two specific difficulties: proper names and culture-bound references. The interpreters' performance is analysed using rendition categories based on the work by Wadensjö (1998). Results are discussed in the light of previous studies and Relevance Theory.
The role of interpreters working on Italian television is undergoing change. The traditional role, that of an invisible black box, is being challenged by what we define as an ethics of entertainment. The three principal factors affecting this ethics are professional performing capacity, ‘the comfort factor’, and the context of culture. A corpus of 200 hours of Italian talk show interpreting is drawn on to illustrate the tension between the traditional norms of fidelity or invisibility and the needs of TV emotainment (visible involvement and performance). In analyzing the successful interpreter’s strategies and behaviour we suggest that a solution to this double bind lies in an expansion of the traditional role toward multivariate mediation encompassing varying perceptual positions and sensitivity to context.
News and public affairs programming is increasingly organized around modes of human interaction rather than scripted narratives. This paper surveys a number of such interactional forms in the US, with an emphasis on news interviews, news conferences, and various forms involving audience participation (radio call-in shows, TV talk shows, and town meetings). These are analyzed as distinct arenas within the public sphere, each with its own conditions of access and modes of conduct. Accordingly, interactional arenas are examined from the standpoint of their historical development, constraints on participation, and the evolving norms and practices that organize conduct. The conclusion of the paper addresses the broader ramifications of broadcast interaction for journalism, politics, and the public sphere. # 2004 Published by Elsevier B.V. In recent years there has been a sea change in broadcast news and public affairs programming. The traditional way of packaging and presenting news—in the form of a narrative or story, which dominated broadcasting up through the early 1980s— has steadily declined in prominence. It now coexists alongside a plethora of communicative forms organized around human interaction—news interviews, news conferences, panel discussions, formal and informal debates, town meetings, and talk shows of various kinds. Some of these forms are fully institutionalized within broadcasting where they function as programming formats; others are ad hoc events occurring independently but still broadcast to the public. This diverse collection of media events shares a common property: each involves relatively unscripted encounters involving some combination of public figures, media professionals, and ordinary people.
Today most professional football teams are multilingual; at the same time, the increasing media exposure of this sport has led to a growing number of press conferences involving players and coaches with limited proficiency in the language of the country where they play. As a result, there is a niche market for interpreters in professional football. This paper presents a case study based on a small corpus of press conferences organised for the official presentation of new players: its aim is to describe communication dynamics, common practices and pitfalls and to discuss interpreter roles in such settings.
In the last two decades, Dialogue Interpreting (DI) has been studied extensively through the lenses of discourse analysis and conversation analysis. As a result, DI has been recognised as an interactional communicative event, in which all the participants jointly and actively collaborate. Nevertheless, most of these studies focused merely on the verbal level of interaction, whereas its multimodal dimension has not received much attention so far, and the literature on this subject is still scarce and dispersed. By analysing and comparing two sequences, taken from a corpus of face-to-face interpreter-mediated encounters in pedagogical settings, this study aims at showing how multimodal analysis can contribute to a deeper understanding of the interactional dynamics of DI. In particular, the paper sheds light on how participants employ multimodal resources (gaze, gesture, body position, proxemics, object manipulation) to co-construct different participation frameworks throughout the encounters, and how the “ecology of action” (i.e., the relationships between the participants and the surrounding environment) influences the development of interaction.
This paper presents a selection of empirical studies of television interpreting in the Austrian context. Following an introductory review of the unique features of TV interpreting and the rationale for studying it, the main methodological options, ranging from observational to experimental approaches, are briefly discussed. The paper then reports empirical analyses, several of them conducted in the framework of recent MA theses completed at the University of Vienna under the author's supervision. These examples serve to demonstrate the significant potential of research using corpora of authentic high-exposure interpreting and highlight the great variety of issues to be investigated, which range from the distinction between different target-language varieties to product-oriented analyses of rhetorical devices and to experiments eliciting TV interpreting consumers' preferences and attitudes.
"Politics is quintessentially a language game", as Geis (1987: 13) wrote. As such it has its own rules, which politicians are expected to abide by, especially when addressing a television audience during a debate. Interpreters having to cope withmedia events1 are required to act professionally while remain pragmatically and interactionally aware of the situation. Therefore, they may use a number of linguistic strategies and devices primarily aiming at accomplishing specific communicative functions. However, such process may lead to a change in the pragmatic level of the interpreted text (IT) if compared to the original one (OT). This paper aims at analysing the impact discourse modalisation has on ITs. The research carried out on simultaneous interpreting (SI) of five American presidential debates ranging from 1984 to 2008 would suggest that modality markers used in the target language may emphasise the pragmatic level of ITs, whereas omissions and inaccurate renditions of speakers' statements would determine a mitigation of the emotional impact as perceived by interpretation users.
This paper examines how participants in an interpreter-mediated televised interview communicate involvement in a shared event. It takes as a case in point an interview where Michail Gorbachev, accompanied by his interpreter Pavel Palazchenko, appear on the ALL TALK show, hosted by the BBC journalist Clive Anderson. Detailed analysis of the interview demonstrates how the interpreter's physical presence helps shape a shared image of him as someone "just translating". It is suggested, that the efficiency by which his translation work is communicated, apart from owing to the interpreter's fluency in English and Russian, is due to the others' communicative behaviour. While addressing one another as conversational partners and interacting with the studio audience and the viewer, they cast him variably as sharing and not fully sharing their ongoing exchange. Moreover, his efficiency as interpreter is shown to be a result of his ability to anticipate grammatical and pragmatic features of turn composition. Overall, the study demonstrates how detailed analyses of real-life interpreter-mediated interaction can assist in explaining and teasing apart the illusive "invisibility" of interpreters.
Plan de l'articleIntroduction"Invisibility" and the Role of Non-Person Interpreters' Personhood and the Machinery of TranslationParticipation - Three Analytical LevelsExplorations of Alignment Work in Talk Show DataPlaying With the Interpreter's Presence and AgencyAlignment Work in the ALL TALK Show"Well done Pavel"Alignment with the AudienceAlignment Work and Interpreting Techniques"I hope this joke is very good, I must say"TRPs in interpreter-mediated talkConcluding Discussion
The language I am speaking of now, that I am almost speaking, is a language whose every syllable is a gesture of reconciliation. (Malouf 1990: 98) This paper investigates current practices in community interpreting in Australia with a view to identifying the role actually played by the interpreter within the overall power dynamics of linguistically mediated triadic interactions. From the vantage point of the Australian context, which can boast a fully-fledged system of public sector interpreting services, the concept of 'power management' has been explored on the basis of data collected during interpreted encounters between members of the Italian community and representatives of Australian health care institutions. Assuming that the metaphor of the interpreter as a non-involved conduit is untenable in community interpreting situations, characterised not only by unequal power distribution between the primary parties, but also by the interpreter's advantage over both of them by virtue of his/her linguistic and cultural knowledge, the question which this paper attempts to answer is to what extent the interpreter's verbal and non-verbal choices contribute to a favourable outcome of the encounter in terms of "re-conciliation".
During the 2008 European football championships, the European Union of Football As-sociations (UEFA) assigned an interpreter to all participating teams for the duration of the tournament. All teams were bound by the regulations to hold one pre-match and one post-match press conference and the official languages always included English and the languages of the two teams. Simultaneous interpreting was chosen for this kind of com-municative situation and English was used as a pivot language whenever necessary. The recordings of all the Italy press conferences held during EURO2008 have been transcribed to create the FOOTIE (Football in Europe) corpus, in order to carry out semi-automatic analyses of certain features of this kind of communicative situation. Football press con-ferences are an example of dialogic communication characterised by high interactivity, fast pace and the use of domain-specific language, and as such they pose specific chal-lenges to the interpreter. 79 interpreting football press conferences...
This article reviews recent remote interpreting (RI) experiments carried out at the United Nations and European Union institutions, with emphasis on their salient technical features, which are also summarized in the Appendix. Motivations for remote interpreting with minimum technical requirements for sound and image transmission in compressed form as well as the methods used in recent experiments for image capture in the meeting room and display in the remote room are discussed. The impact of technical conditions upon interpreters' perception of remote interpreting is also examined using questionnaire data, which seem to suggest that the interpreters' visual perception of the meeting room, as mediated by image displays, is the determining factor for the “alienation or absence of a feeling of presence in the meeting room universally experienced by interpreters under RI conditions. The paper also points out the advantages of a more coherent research methodology based upon the notion of presence in a virtual environment as well as possible innovative approaches to providing the interpreter with meeting room views.