Past work (Metzger 1999, Metzger et al. 2004) has suggested that interpreters in institutional settings are participants in the ongoing interaction rather than neutral entities that transmit information from one language into another. In this study, I address the question of translating in the context of everyday interactions among members of a multilingual family, where the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law do not share a common language and interact through the translations of the bilingual daughter. I adopt an intertextuality point-of-view, where translation is considered as reshaping prior texts into new contexts (Becker 1994). As pointed out by Becker, it is impossible to retain the meaning of the original utterance in its translation due to contextual constraints that include structural, medial, referential, generic, and interpersonal relations that operate within and across texts. In this paper, I focus on interpersonal relations, that is, relations of text to participants, and analyze how the interpreter reshapes prior utterances into new contexts (i.e. languages) and how the relations between texts and participants play a role in the reshaping of texts. I identify and describe four kinds of interactive phenomena that arise from the interpersonal relations: The interpreter (1) foregrounds her own participation by positioning the original utterances as support for her own points, (2) engages in what Bell (1984) refers to as audience design, at times using verbal and nonverbal explanations rather than word-to-word translations, (3) adds imagery in the narratives she is translating in order to create “conversational involvement” (Tannen 2007), (4) performs the social action (such as offering or requesting) on the speaker’s behalf instead of translating her utterances. The study furthers our understanding of intertextuality in the context of translation, and also translation in naturally occurring interactions in everyday life as part of social relationships.

 

 

Selected references

Becker, A. L. (1994). Repetition and otherness: An essay. Advances in Discourse Processes, 48, 162-162.

Bell, A. (1984). Language style as audience design. Language in society, 13(2), 145-204.

Metzger, M. (1999). Sign language interpreting: Deconstructing the myth of neutrality. Gallaudet University Press.

Metzger, M., Fleetwood, E., & Collins, S. D. (2004). Discourse genre and linguistic mode: Interpreter influences in visual and tactile interpreted interaction. Sign Language Studies, 4(2), 118-137.

Tannen, D. (2007). Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse (Vol. 26). Cambridge University Press.