Small talk in interpreted interactions in a medical setting

ABSTRACT

Even though the importance of small talk in institutional interactions has been extensively demonstrated in sociolinguistic studies, it has never been the object of analysis in interpreted interactions. Given the interpreters' theoretically prescribed role as animator in such interactions, it is particularly interesting to investigate how interpreters deal with small talk, while this type of talk may also offer important opportunities to clients for constructing interpersonal relationships with professionals. This study focuses on recordings of naturally occurring interpreted interactions in a medical context and the analyses demonstrate that almost all small talk is oriented to the interpreters. These thus hold a pivotal role in small talk sequences and this allows them to do a wide variety of identity work far beyond the prescribed role of translator. Finally, there is only limited evidence that small talk may contribute to establishing an interpersonal relationship between clients and professionals across language barriers.

Ook al is het belang van small talk in institutionele interacties al uitgebreid aangetoond in sociolinguïstische studies, toch is het nog nooit onderzocht in getolkte interacties. Theoretisch gezien zouden tolken in zulke interacties louter als animators moeten optreden en dus is het interessant om te bestuderen hoe tolken omgaan met small talk. Daarnaast is het zo dat dit type van taalgebruik belangrijke kansen inhoudt voor cliënten om interpersoonlijke relaties te construeren met professionals. Deze studie focust op opnames van getolkte interacties in een medische context en de analyses tonen aan dat bijna alle small talk gericht is op de tolken. Die nemen dus een centrale rol in small talk-sequenties op, waardoor ze in staat zijn om verschillende identiteiten te construeren, naast hun voorgeschreven rol van vertaler. Tot slot blijken er slecht weinig indicaties te zijn dat small talk kan bijdragen tot het uitbouwen van interpersoonlijke relaties tussen cliënten en professionals over taalbarrières heen.

KEYWORDS:

• Small talk
• interpreting
• participation framework
• medical interactions
• identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Dorien Van De Mieroop is an associate professor at the University of Leuven, Belgium. Her research focuses mainly on the discursive analysis of identity construction in institutional interactions as well as in narratives. She published more than 20 articles on this topic in peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Narrative Inquiry, Pragmatics, Interpreting and Discourse & Society.

Notes

1. The influence of such prior professional relationships can be very diverse, as is also the case in these data. For example, one interpreter commented on her previous experiences with the care receiver in rather negative ways to the care giver, while another interpreter drew on such prior experiences to suggest a solution for a care receiver's problem. Hence, this may influence the interactional dynamics in many complicated ways of which the discussion extends far beyond the scope of this paper.

2. The data were collected by Elien Stappaerts, Joke Van Den Bulck and Lotte Van Hove. They also made protocols of the data and translated the Russian and Italian sections. Of course, I am largely endebted to them for allowing me to use these data for my analyses.

3. Since this is a descriptive, and not a normative, study (cf. Mason, 2009, p. 52), I will use the term ‘interpreter’ throughout the article. Some readers may find this problematic because the interlocutors in this corpus did not receive a full professional training as an interpreter. By using this term, however, I only intend to point at this interlocutor's specific role in the interactions under study.

4. Activity types can be defined as ‘goal-defined, socially constituted, bounded, events with constraints on participants, setting, and so on, but above all on the kinds of allowable contributions’ (Levinson, 1992, p. 69).

5. These were not taken into account for this study since not all phatic exchanges were recorded due to the fact that many interpreter–patient greetings occurred in the waiting room.

6. Unfortunately, we have no further details in what way precisely.

7. See endnote 4.

8. Again, it seems better to refer to one complex multilingual participation framework instead of two, as this type of small talk may not invoke a situation of cognitive overload, but the presence of talk in an unintelligible language may hinder the non-oral transactional work of the overhearer.

9. See endnote 1.