I´m quite enamored of Blommaert; I hope I can locate him and make direct contact. The notes on "Text and Context" I´ve generated include ruminations on tentative "findings" of the conference interpreter discourse to date and more sharply defined research questions. Also, Van Manen is being extremely useful and timely with his explanation of a phenomenological approach to research - NOT the usual social scientific mode (and who would I be if I did anything in the "usual" way?!!
Interpreting: May 2005 Archives
I was asked by one interpreter if there was a difference between what I’m trying to do with my research and what journalists do when they research and publish stories. Many of the points I considered possible distinctions were persuasively argued as not that different, but the one point which seemed most different is the notion of participation in the writing/publication process.
I started reading this book Leda loaned me, Researching Lived Experience by Max Van Manen, which describes the phenomenological angle in terms that reflect my ontology. Van Manen says, “phenomenology attempts to explicate the meanings as we live them in our everyday existence, our lifeworld” (11).
In my quest for themes among interpreters for the European Parliament, one I hope to pursue some more is the perspective of the longer-term interpreters of changes in the way MEPs talk. Thirty years ago, Parliament was solely a political body, designed for debate. Now, with the accrual of legislative power, it’s become “a technocratic body”. It seems to me that this, in and of itself, doesn’t have to necessarily lead to changes in the presentation or style of discourse, but according to a few people it has. They’ve noticed a certain amount of homogeneity emerging over the past years. On the one hand, this is attributed to a reduction in MEPs speaking extemporaneously; almost everyone speaks from prepared statements (which they read very fast, the bane of simultaneous interpretation). This homogeneity is described as a social process, of people becoming more “americanized” and seeking some amount of conformity to the structure – perhaps it is a parallel process with that of the structure of interpreters as the number of languages has increased?
It may have been quite the sacrifice – not to mention my loss! – for my informants to agree to converse with me during their down time about their experiences as interpreters at the European Parliament. I am grateful, and have I ever learned a lot! It feels a bit odd to use that phrase, “my informants”, as there is certainly no possessive component except for the individual willingness to join an investigation of interpreter’s worldviews: “to get inside interpreters’ heads”, as one participant put it. :-) And “informants” is so technical (down with technicality!) . . . in social scientific terms it is accurate (for this initial stage), but it isn’t the kind of research model I wish to invoke. I hope several of the interpreters who spoke with me over the past three days (and any who choose to join this conversation, publicly here, or by private email to me) will become participating researchers and engage proactively with me/us in not only interpreting (!) the discursive data but also in formulating questions and desirable outcomes of this particularly situated study. In other words, to deliberately and dialogically co-construct knowledge regarding the role, values, paradoxes, pleasures, ambitions, frustrations, etcetera of the job (it IS a job).
I hope no one is "put off" by the informality here. Of course some of my academic-ese comes through, but ideally this is just another venue for chat. :-)
Jan Blommeart is an Africanist, ethnographer, and synergistic critical discourse analyst. Taking the terms in reverse:
Discourse – “language in society”, not just language use but also the sum of communicative acts, and these acts situated in context.
Critical – the performance of analyses that “expose and critique existing wrongs in one’s society – analyses that should be ‘brought home’” (4).
Synergistic – drawing from multiple sources, e.g., Hymes, Fairclough, Bauman, Bernstein, Bourdieu, Wallerstein, Bahktin, Foucault, Habermas, Hall, Hanks, Scollon. He particularly notes Norman Fairclough, British Cultural Studies (the Birmingham School), and French poststructuralism (23).
Ethnography – “an approach in which the analysis of small phenomena is set against an analysis of big phenomena . . . and both . . . can only be understood in terms of one another” (16).
An Africanist perspective: “in the age of globalization, it is worth having a look at materials from the peripheries of the world system” (20).
The central problem of this approach is to locate the relationship between a text (the microsocial) and its context (the macrosocial).
