David Krueger forwarded info on health care interpreting to the VermontDeaf listserv.
This comes right as I get ready to wind up the final week of research with European Parliament interpreters and - after RID - gear up for the plunge into community interpreting for the Turkish community in Germany.
Did someone say, segue? :-)
I finally found a bottle of Reisling to belatedly celebrate my birthday.
Had a nice chat with the salesclerk in the wine shop in Ghent, who also recommended a fab place for lunch. I'm stuffed to the gills! My mind is also still full to the brim from another confab with Prof Blommaert. We've got hypotheses and research questions out the wazoo! :-)
Found the reference I was looking for after emailing for help. I still need help, but at least I can be more specific now!
It’s taken me this long to see it, but I do think there is a generational difference that is identifiable roughly along lines of experience as an interpreter. It’s more clear between those who’ve maintained a long career at the Parliament and those who are near the beginning, but there’s also overlap between the more experienced interpreters who worked for many years within their own countries before coming to Parliament and those who are EP veterans. The most basic way it’s shown up is in their explanations about getting here, to work at the Parliament. Older interpreters tend to describe a happenstance series of events, while younger interpreters describe academic and career trajectories. I’ll have to revisit the transcripts to see if this holds, but I think that few of the younger/newer interpreters describe their relationship to language, whereas almost all of the older/experienced interpreters bring it up spontaneously. At the least, my cumulative impression is that the language element receives varying degrees of emphasis. This orientation to/relationship with language might be a condition of possibility for certain kinds of subjectivity…hmm, it also may be an effect of globalization trends – particularly the spread of capitalism. In the cyclical way institutionalization works, these may be two sides of the same coin, and that “coin” may be a particular process of professionalization.
The challenge, then, is to identify the nodes of autonomy in these positions: where they overlap and diverge from each other as coherent perceptions (if not actually worldviews).
This must be one of the most medieval towns in existence.
It was the right thing for me to do after meeting with Prof. Blommaert (dare I be all-familiar-like and call him Jan?!) yesterday. It let my brain cool (!) after so many pieces and intuitions of this research project were validated....it felt ... penultimate? It's not the peak, but it gave me the sense I am really "on" to something (not just my imagination!), and encouraged me to keep the faith. :-) Anyway, my brain was basically blank so it's just as well I didn't need to do anything particularly intellectual. :-)
Take the boat tour when you go! Best way to see a big chunk of the town.
that Professor Blommaert is going to be at DeXus 3.0? No, of course not! I'm thinking I should retract the "Why Bother" (Deaf - ASL/English interpreter) poster proposal and re-submit something about European Parliament interpreters. The question is if I can pull it together by then, but of course it would be ridiculous not to figure it out and take advantage of that opportunity.
Unlikely. :-) But my prof thinks I'm up to something (this has happened before, btw!) She was "struck by the approach" of "involving your informants by sharing your analyses/engaging in participatory methods...so early."
The question is, does sharing my thoughts on the blog "help" or "hinder" the research effort?
“…there’s no one else who knows how to speak to both of them – to her and to him. It’s you who stands between them: whatever they say to each other will go through your ears and your lips. But for you neither of them will know what is in the mind of the other. Their words will be in your hands you can make them mean what you will” (257).
I've been given a number of leads on publications regarding interpreting:
What am I going to say about Strasbourg Week 2? I may be too earnest for my own good! Interpreters use humor in many ways – to discharge stress, express cynicism, and enact intimacy. I’m not sure of the extent to which interpreters from each nationality do this – it is a characteristic of co-interpreter banter (from the same booth, especially) more than the one-on-one interviews with me, but most interpreters have used humor during the interviews to varying degrees.
OHMYGOSH Jan Blommaert is only a short train ride away at Ghent University!
These are the questions which previous interviews suggest. They may yield empirical evidence for the kinds of issues raised by Blommaert about mobility, resources, indexicality, pretextualization, and entextualization (or variations thereof):
Orienting:
1. Where – which settings/contexts – do you interpret the most?
2. Which do you like the least/most?
3. Which are most/least challenging and how does this correlate with your enjoyment of the work?
I told my host family last night that I’d been able to move my thinking forward in terms of the kinds of questions to ask interpreters going into the week in Strasbourg. Helena asked how. It’s actually still a bit vague in my own mind, so perhaps I can write out loud and gain clarity. I’ll use Van Manen as my reference point, because the notion of phenomenology - interpreter’s consciousness and their awareness of self/other consciousness - is a move that the discourse enables. (This reflective writing doubles as a note-taking exercise clarifying my phenomenological research methodology.)
Dutch sign on Europe’s wall is posted on openDemocracy.net. Reactions to the French no last weekend were mixed among interpreters, ranging from barely suppressed glee to outright disappointment. Only a few, however, had truly dire predictions for the future of the EU, and none felt it would affect their working conditions in any way. Most expressed varying degrees of optimism that the "no" would trigger some serious reflection among officials and MEPs away from pure economics toward the social, and only a few felt it would be nearly impossible to forge agreement again. Those who were close to the negotiating process say they already saw how difficult it was and how many compromises were made on many sides...
Did I say all this before?! I feel that I did, but if so I can't locate it right now. Was talking with someone earlier today about brain stretching and overload - clearly my sense of having adjusted was premature! :-)
“Even if language forms are similar or identical, the way in which they get inserted in social actions may differ significantly and, consequently, there may be huge differences in what these (similar or identical) forms do in real societies” (italics in original, Blommaert, 71).
I think interpreters know this. It may be intuitive knowledge, esoteric rather than empirical. Occasionally there is a story told as a heuristic, but more often it is something interpreters describe as a feeling: when they know they’ve done a good job for instance, because they’ve elicited the same response in the receivers of the interpreted message as those who received in the same language as the speaker. In other words, the function of the message has been delivered, as measured by its effect...?...or by the internal (subjective) self-assessment of equivalence? (And would the latter be necessarily "less" than the former?)
The rest is a melange -
