1,720,974 research outputs found
Television Interpreting and its playful macro-function
No full textThe paper examines interpreting and its interactional aspects in the context of the televised interview. In this preliminary study the aim is to explore the active role of the interpreter as a ratified participant in the interaction. Data are taken from a larger corpus of televised interviews, pertaining to the infotainment genre, interpreted in simultaneous voice-over by an Italian conference interpreter and broadcast on Italian television. Both the source and target texts are transcribed and analyzed, in order to investigate the interactional strategies. In the first part the pragmatic features of broadcast talk and its playful macro-function are outlined; in the second part, drawing on conversational analysis, I explore how the role and identity of a television interpreter is shaped by the interaction’s participants. I assume here that on television, interpreters act as ratified participants displaying greater involvement and interactional skills.
Keywords - television itnerpreting; infotainment; ratified participant; playful function; interactional skill
Skilled-based and Knowledge-based strategies in Media Interpreting
No full textKnowledge-based and skill-based strategies in Media interpreting
Clara Pignataro
IULM - Italy
Television Interpreting and Conference Interpreting have always been regarded to be profoundly different in terms of the expected performance and the interpreting strategies required. Television interpreting is a multi-faceted activity, requiring a peculiar mind-set and specific communicative skills: television interpreters produce their own text, in the attempt to secure coherence and convey the same effect that the speaker wants to obtain, with little or no possibility to use décalage due to the pragmatic context. The paper investigates how the discourse flow is managed by television interpreters, with a special focus on the use of prosody and discourse markers. The analysis is conducted on a corpus of recorded texts, interpreted in simultaneous mode by a professional conference interpreter, working for public television. The typology of the interpreted event is the press conference interview characterized by a rapid questioning style. Thanks to this analysis, a profile of television interpreters and their interpreting strategies will be outlined
Interlinguistic and intercultural mediation in healthcare settings
No full textThe paper investigates the role of interlinguistic intercultural mediators in healthcare settings, where they act both as responders, affiliating with the patient in a two-party interaction, and as translators/coordinators, formulating the affective gist of the mediator-patient conversation for the doctor
ELF Pragmatics and Interpreting
No full textA corpus-driven research in ELF intercultural communication: potential benefits of using corpora in interpreter training for quality assessment
Clara Pignataro
IULM
Milan -Italy
English as a lingua franca (ELF) has become a worldwide phenomenon (Kellet Bidoli 2012) posing challenges to interpreters (Kurz 2008) and interpreters trainers that have not been studied in depth (Albl-Mikasa 2010). With globalization and increased mobility most communication is taking place between second language users and the fact that English has become a worldwide lingua franca has major linguistic (Cogo and Dewey 2012) and pedagogic implications. Against this background, a corpus-driven research is being carried out on video recorded face-to-face interactions (Seidlhofer 2004, Cogo 2006, 2009) interpreted in consecutive mode, from English into Italian, by Italian conference interpreters during Literary Festivals. The investigation is supported by Transana, a software for qualitative analysis; both source and target texts are transcribed and analysed with a conversation analysis and an ethnographic approach (Hymes1972) to study ELF intercultural communication in interpreting scenarios. The final intention of my study is to apply the results of this corpus-driven investigation to interpreters training methodologies with a focus on intercultural pragmatic competence as a key parameter for quality assessment. Some preliminary results will be presented.
Keywords: ELF, intercultural communication, quality.
Albl-Mikasa, M. 2010. Global English and English as a lingua franca (ELF): implications for the interpreting profession. Trans-kom 3, 2, 126-148. Downloaded from http://www.trans-kom.eu on 10th December 2012.
Cogo, A., Dewey, M. 2006. Efficiency in ELF communication: from pragmatic motives to lexicogrammatical innovation. Nordic Journal of English Studies, 5, 2, 59-94.
Cogo, A. 2009. Accommodating difference in ELF conversations: a study of pragmatic strategies. In A. Mauranen and E. Ranta (eds.), English as a Lingua Franca: Studies and Findings, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar Press, pp. 254-273.
Cogo, A., Dewey, M. 2012. Analysing English as a Lingua Franca. A Corpus-Driven Investigation. London/New York: Continuum.
Crystal, D. (2003). English as a Global Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hymes, D. (1972). Models of the interaction of language and social life. In J. J Gumperz and D. Hymes (eds.), Directions in Sociolinguistics: the Ethnography of Communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, pp. 35-71.
Jenkins, J. (2011). Accommodating (to) ELF in the international university. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(4), 926-936.
Kellet Bidoli, C. 2012. Interpreting scenarios: changing modes, ELF and genres. Interpreting Across Genres: Multiple Research Perspectives. Trieste: EUT.
Kurz, I. (2008). The impact of non-native English on students’ interpreting performance. In Hansen, G., Chesterman, A., Gerzymisch-Arbogast, H. (eds), Efforts and Models In Interpreting and Translation Research. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 179-192.
Seidlhofer, B. (2004). Research perspectives on teaching English as a lingua franca. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 24, 209-239
Terminology and Interpreting in LSP conferences: a Computer-aided vs. Empirical-based Approach
No full textESSE 2010
Turin, 24th – 28th August 2010,
Seminar 52: Interpreting Scenarios with English.
Terminology and Interpreting in LSP Conferences: Computer-Aided vs. Empirical-Based Approach
Extended abstract
Simultaneous interpreters working in scientific conferences need to learn specialized terminology (LSP) and ontological structures in a rather short time, in order to produce adequate target texts (Viezzi 1996; Will, 2007). The terminological study carried out by the interpreter does not merely concentrate on lexical equivalencies but on a deeper level, on the contexts of the most problematic linguistic and semantic structures for knowledge acquisition .
There is a time and place for everything and le mot juste for every time and place, particularly in special languages, a restricted area of human activity. [...] There are in fact many circumstances where only a particular form of expression is acceptable. (Sager et al., 1981: 4)
Analysing texts before the conference to detect and investigate any possible bottleneck that might hinder disambiguation during simultaneous interpreting is essential to ensure an interpreting of good quality. This paper investigates complex noun phrases (NPs) with premodification in scientific English and the interpreting pattern in the language pair English-Italian. Disambiguating and translating complex NPs with premodifications can be very demanding for simultaneous interpreters, due to their complexity and frequency of use (Gotti 1991, 2008). Premodifications can include a high number of constituents and their semantic relations can be quite obscure: only specialized knowledge and context will assist the interpreter in the disambiguation process (Carriò 2008). Detecting these “peculiarities” and working on them during the preparation phase may contribute to developing an automatic recognition system and applying an adequate coping strategy in the booth. In the paper the interpreting pattern will be analysed along the guidelines that some scholars have provided to understand and disambiguate complex NP with premodification (Salager-Meyer 1983; Carriò 2005; Quirk 1987).
Methods
Two methodologies have been used and applied to the same corpus of texts: one is more empirical and represents the most frequently adopted approach among conference interpreters, that is to say to read documents and select NPs manually; the second is supported by Wordsmith Tools, for the identification of clusters and contexts of use. Both lists of clusters will be used and assessed by the interpreter during simultaneous interpretation. The investigation was conducted on a corpus of abstracts and slides (English) provided by a conference organizer of veterinary training courses. The material consists of 25 veterinary texts referring, respectively, to clinical immunology and dermatology (10 texts) and breeding (15 texts) for a total of 31,372 words. The average length of the articles ranges from 1,549 to 2,973 words. The work is divided into four stages. During the first stage, NPs with premodifications were extracted and classified into 4 different clusters formed by 2, 3, 4 or 5 elements. Nouns were more frequent than adjectives but NPs with adjectives were not discarded, as a demonstration that the longer the NP, the more difficult it is to translate it (Carriò 2008). In the second stage an analysis of interpreting pattern was carried out for each group of cluster. The translation strategy adopted for disambiguation is paraphrase: the semantic and syntactic construction is fully “exploded” and made explicit. In the third stage a manual search was carried out, in order to identify NPs with premodification. The clusters identified manually were subdivided into categories, using the same method described above. In the fourth stage, the lists of clusters identified with W.S were compared with the lists of clusters produced manually, and both of them were tested and used in the translation booth. The clusters extracted manually by the interpreter present a cognitive conceptual structure; they are organized by order of appearance in the discourse and divided by categories (such as: pathologies, drugs, viruses): the terms will be more easily memorized and quickly retrieved during a simultaneous interpretation if structured in a conceptual system. The clusters extracted with Wordsmith Tools were ranked alphabetically and the contexts contributed to the process of knowledge acquisition. The list created by Wordsmith resulted very specific but it did not take into account the arbitrariness criterion that is of paramount importance to customize a terminological work. The work of terminology construction is an iterative process and software tools give their contribution in terms of speeding up the process of terms extraction, but the manual and cognitive contribution of the interpreter is undoubtedly unreplaceable. We hope that the present work will stimulate further investigations in setting guidelines for terminological work for conference interpreters in LSP, especially for the disambiguation of complex English NP with premodification in scientific English, considering other languages, such as French, Spanish and German.
References
Carrio, Pastor, M.L 2005. Contrastive Analysis of Scientific-technical Discourse: Common Writing Errors and Variations in the Use of English as a Non-native Language. Ann Arbor: UMI.
Coetzee, J.M 1992. Isaac Newton and the Ideal of a Transparent Scientific Language (1982). Doubling the Point. Essays and Interviews. Cambridge / Massachussetts / London / England: Harvard University Press.
Fissore, Valerio / Henderson Ruth Anne 2008. Disambiguation of English pre- and postmodified noun phrases. In Martelli / Pulcini (eds) Investigating English with Corpora. Studies in Honour of Maria Teresa Prat. Monza/Italy: Polimetrica International Scientific Publisher, 137-152.
Garzone, Giuliana 2001. Comunicazione Specialistica e Interpretazione di Conferenza. Trieste: Edizioni Università di Trieste.
Garzone, Giuliana 2003. LSPs and Discourse Practices in Organisational and Institutional Settings. In Garzone, Giuliana, Domain-Specific English and Language Mediation. Milano: Arcipelago Edizioni, 22-48.
Garzone, Giuliana 2006. Perspectives on ESP and popularization. Milano: CUEM.
Gile, Daniel 1995. Basic Concepts and Models for Interpreter and Translator Training. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Goffman, Erving 1981. Forms of Talk. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gotti, Maurizio 1991. I linguaggi speciali. Firenze: La Nuova Italia.
Gotti, Maurizio 2008. Investigating Specialized Discourse. Berlin: Peter Lang.
Halliday, M.A.K 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold.
Magris, Marella / Musacchio, Maria Teresa / Rega, Lorenza / Scarpa Federica 2002. Manuale di Terminologia. Aspetti teorici, metodologici e applicativi. Milano: Hoepli.
Morelli, Mara, & Errico, Elena 2007. Le microlingue nell'interpretazione: esperienze professionali e didattiche. In Mazzotta, Salmon, Tradurre le microlingue scientifico-professionali. Novara: UTET Universitaria, 347-372.
Sager J.C. Dungworth D., Mcdonald P.F. 1980. English Special Languages. Principles and Practice in Science and Technology. Viesbaden: Oscar Brandstetter Verlag K.G
Salager-Meyer, F. 1983. Compound nominal phrases in scientific-technical literature: proportion and rationale. In Pugh and Ulijn (eds) Reading for Professional Purposes; Studies in Native and Foreign Languages. London: Heinemann, 137-145.
Scarpa, Federica 2008. La traduzione specializzata. Un approccio didattico professionale. Milano: Hoepli
Voice is caption: television interpreting and quality issues
No full textLanguage is not the only way to execute an interaction: in oral communication much information is conveyed through extra-linguistic elements (Straniero Sergio 2007: 303), proxemics, gestures, voice and pauses (Cecot 2001). Stress and voice accentuation are important prosodic elements used by the interpreter as a caption, to convey information (Ahrens 2002: 42) and render the speaker’s “communicative intentions” (Kopczynski 1994: 89) to elicit a response from the audience. In the oral text voice intonation is also important in terms of cohesion, which is intended as “the result of the relationship between wordings, that is to say how the messages are expressed, and soundings, that is to say how they are uttered” (Straniero Sergio 2007: 300). In a “sequential environment” or in a “triadic exchange” the interpreter’s voice and intonation resources capture (Captionem) the listener’s attention and contribute to determine the progression of dialogic interaction (Straniero Sergio 2007: 301), facilitating the disambiguation process (Schlesinger 1994: 231). Therefore interpreters are evaluated not only for interpreting a speech correctly but convincingly well (Straniero Sergio 2007: 172). Interpreting quality is not an absolute value, but rather “contextually determined” (Kopczynski 1994: 87; Chesterman 1993 ). For the purpose of this study, quality can be defined as a pragmatic property where the interpreter “uses language in order to produce a particular effect in the mind of the listener” (Schlesinger 1994: 87) and on the “perceptions of the audience as users of the interpreters’ product” (Kurz 2001: 128). The study has been conducted on a small corpus of sub-corpus of 4 interviews for a total of 192 minutes in the language combination English-Italian, interpreted in simultaneous voice-over mode by a professional conference interpreter working for the Italian television. Both source and target texts have been transcribed (Straniero Sergio 2007) and analyzed (Heritage 1985) in order to detect the most significant prosodic features for quality assessment
New professional profiles for linguistic mediation: community interpreting
No full text“New professional profiles for Linguistic Mediation: Community Interpreting”
Until a decade ago, the only interpreting activities deemed worthy of scientific research were simultaneous and consecutive translation, the two principal modes of conference interpreting. Important political and cultural changes, including mass migrations and globalization, have changed working conditions for conference interpreters and have enormously increased the importance of other modes of translation, used outside the conference context. Due to the effect of globalization, more and more attention is being drawn to various forms of oral linguistic mediation, among which community interpreting, or interpreting for public services (health care, legal and police institutions, immigration services and social service agencies).
The contribution is designed to provide an overview of the status of the Italian situation as far as community interpreting is concerned, and shed some light on the role and working conditions of community interpreters, particularly those working in the medical field. What role is envisioned for the linguistic mediator working as an interpreter outside the conference room? A description and analysis will be made of the linguistic competences required, the communication skills and personality traits required to perform such a delicate job. Finally, pedagogical issues will be discussed and a proposal for a possible training methodology will be outlined, highlighting specific coping strategies for future community interpreters
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