Non-Close Renditions: Ways and Consequences of Saying Something Different in Interpreter-Mediated Healthcare Interactions

ABSTRACT

In interpreter-mediated interactions the interpreter’s translational activity constitutes the core of mutual understanding. Translating other participants’ verbal productions implies various interactional moves on the part of the interpreter, which reveal his/her coordinating role within the interaction. These two activities originate from the interpreter’s knowledge of the languages and cultures involved as well as of his/her expertise in interpreting, which, in turn, result in his/her power to promote, modify, or block the interaction. Of course, interpreters do not act in a vacuum: it is through the interplay of all interlocutors that interpreters fully participate in the co-construction of the interaction. In this contribution we consider all those cases in which interpreters’ translations depart from the corresponding primary speakers’ turns. These cases are identified here as non-close renditions, a new analytical category integrating Wadensjö’s (1998) classification. We investigate how non-closeness may affect the interpreter’s translation and what repercussions it may have on the unfolding interaction. We specifically focus on the interactional efforts – or the lack thereof – made by the interpreter his-/herself and by other speakers in order to try to retrace their steps back to what was originally said.

Notes

1. For a complete description of each rendition type, see Wadensjö (1998, pp. 106–108).

2. Of course, propositional content is not absent in the other rendition categories, which are first and foremost defined in terms of their positioning within the interactional sequence.

3. Interlocutors within the interaction are identified as follows: DOC = doctor; INT = interpreter; PAT = patient.

4. The word “puntura” corresponding to the French word “piqûre” may refer to either “sting” or “injection” in English.

5. For privacy reasons all the elements that might reveal the identity of persons or healthcare institutions (e.g. names of people and places, bio data, etc.) have been removed from the transcripts.

6. Unless otherwise specified, the interpreter (INT) and the doctor (DOC) in the MIG ‒ Monini Corpus excerpts are always the same two persons, while in examples taken from the other two data sets each interaction involves a different doctor and a different interpreter.

7. Patients in the Mig – Monini Corpus are identified by the acronym PAT, followed by their progressive number of appearance.

8. PATS = patient’s son.

9. Reference is made here to a real-life incident, featured on the front pages of local newspapers, that took place a few years ago in Trieste and involved a mediator-interpreter.