Investigating Community Interpreting as a Dialogic and Multimodal Process: Developing a Framework for Understanding the Psycholinguistic Process of English-Chinese Sight Translation

Abstract

Sight translation, a hybrid of translation and interpreting, is widely used in community interpreting settings in Australia, be it the translation of an affidavit in court, a consent form in a healthcare centre or a school report at a parent-teacher meeting. Despite its crucial role in ensuring linguistic rights of linguistically and culturally diverse (CALD) people in Australia, we have little knowledge of how sight translation is processed in the mind of interpreters in the community. Nor do we have a methodological framework to investigate this process. Previous research on sight translation has been based mainly on its long-established use in conference interpreting, where the interpreter has no interaction with their clients. As a result, sight translation was theorised as the production of a monologue, which cannot be readily applied to situations distinctive to community interpreting settings (Pochhacker, 2007).

A small body of research into sight translation in recent times suggests that, during sight translation, instead of relaying the written text as a monologue, community interpreters engage in a dyadic or triadic dialogue with their clients, employing a range of multimodal resources to make sense of meaning together with the clients (Davitti, 2019; Vargas-Urpi, 2018). But exactly how does this dyadic or triadic communication/interactional process take place? What methods can we use to investigate this process? The objectives of the project are a) to develop a framework that intersects traditional Translation and Interpreting Process studies with Interaction studies for studying interpreter-mediated interactions, and b) to use the framework to investigate sight translation as a distinctive mode of intercultural communication that embodies dialogicality, interactivity and multimodality of community interpreting.

Inspired by the Bakhtinian dialogic conceptualisation of language and mind (Bakhtin & Holquist, 1981) and a more situated perspective on cognition in translation and interpreting (Munoz Martin, 2016; Risku, 2017), the current project describes sight translation in community interpreting as situated within a site of dialogic heteroglossia, namely, a site of "many-languaged-ness" (Holquist, 2002: 1).

The project takes a descriptive, mixed-method approach. Two methods widely adopted in process and interaction research, eye-tracking technology and retrospective process tracing, are used to gauge what happens during sight translation in the community. Seven pairs of practising interpreters and community members were recruited to take part a sight translation task, followed by a post-task retrospective inteview. Interpreters' eye movements were recorded on Tobii TX300 and Pupil Lab Core eye trackers and their eye data analysed alongside their retrospective protocols on any decision-making and problem-solving processes. Case studies on two experiments, where in-depth multimodal analyses were conducted, further look into the interplay of multiple interactional resources participants use in dialogic sight translation.

Results confirm interpreters mediate between texts produced by speakers from their unique social-cultural standpoints and make conscious decisions on interaction-oriented reading to make the target rendition more accessible for their CALD clients. Interaction-related eye-tracking indices, specifically lengthened gaze duration and repetitive regression, reflect the interpreter's cognitive efforts comprehending, contextualising and coordinating, when putting the text in context. Interpreters monitor and coordinate these various, multimodal resources that take place beyond the verbal-aural modality in order to better fulfil joint communication goals. Aside from attending to the rendition of the source texts, interpreters were also aware of the situational and contextual idiosyncrasies, such as socio-cultural factors and interpreting ethics, that factored into their cognition. Show more