Interpreting: July 2006 Archives

My own presentation was scheduled for 5 pm on Friday (July 21). Two panelists didn’t show. This was disappointing as their topics seemed closely aligned, however it gave Inka and myself flexibility and allowed time for a rousing discussion within the group. We had a whopping audience of three (!) to begin, then two more wandered in late, another one later, and three more latest: a grand total of nine. Not bad at all. Two of the audience members turned out to be translators for the European Communities (bonus for me!!) and a third had friends who worked within the European Institutions.

Our panel was called “EU: Europe Beyond Geography?” (2.51). Inka’s presentation, “European Public Spheres: Uniting and Dividing,” explored how political subjectivity is constructed in time and space through media systems and by pro-European journalists. I won’t summarize her entire talk but rather will select the parts that (in my mind) led into my talk, or provided me with food for thought about my topic. For instance, Inka characterized the pro-European journalists as the new elite because they are so close to power. These journalists are also a new class because they’ve been able to escape their national landscape. Now they are trying to find a niche for their country in the media geography about the EU: what is our nation doing here? Inka described this as a “new type of instrumental journalism.”

I noted this for its parallels with interpreters, who are also elite by being close to power and have improved their class standing by being dually-situated in their home country and Brussels/Strausburg. The economics of interpretation are quite the battleground, however, and I don’t know how this compares with journalists. The European institutions are insisting on hiring staff interpreters (known as officials or functionnaires) only if they relocate to Brussels. They are also driving incomes down because younger people from newly-joined East European countries are willing to accept lower wages than their West European counterparts. There are still many individuals who work as freelancers – hired only on an as needed basis or for short-term contracts – but the bureaucratizing trend is squeezing out many of the most experienced interpreters and discouraging this independent form of labor.

This panel was great – the closest of all I’ve attended to my own area of current investigation. Marie Gillespie introduced the panelists’ collaborative work as an outgrowth of two puzzles. One puzzle being “the limits of cosmopolitanism and the huge variations in how this term is used” (she listed multiculturalism and internationalism, among other contexts) and the second an imbalance within studies of transnationalism privileging “connectivity [as a] shared topic, interest, [and/or] emphasis,” with “less attention to disconnections, especially with language… [which is] not explored with enough depth.”

The overviews shared here grow out of work on two different research projects:

1) How different language communities interpreted news of 9/11 over the first three months. www.afterseptember11.tv It seems that people with multilingual competencies were mixing, matching, and comparing a variety of different sources of information and news with CNN, Al-Jazeera etc. Multilinguals seem to share a couple of distinct characteristics, such as a profound dissatisfaction with mainstream politics and politicians and a deep distrust of media, leading them to search – actively – for alternative sources.

2) www.mediatingsecurity.com is a collaborative ethnography between Marie and Ben, a 3-year study of transnational media discourses about security. (Which might be relevant to the polycentricity team from Dexus 3.0)

What the panelists have found are three types of cosmpolitanism, which generally “don’t talk to each other”:

1. demotic/elite cosmopolitanism (Marie)
2. normative cosmopolitanism (Ben)
3. aesthetic/literary cosmopolitanism (Tom)

What these three scholars are most interested in are the functions of these various cosmopolitanisms, particularly the ways in which they turn out to have compatibility with fascisistic discourses.

I was going to give her a hard time for only budgeting a half-hour with me – after I came all the way from the US! – but then I was the one at the wrong Starbucks. :-/ Besides, she gave me an hour. :-) And, I've read her excellent book: De-/Re-Contextualizing Conference Interpreting: Interpreters in the Ivory Tower?.

I should have been diligent about notes the entire conversation because she mentioned at least a half-dozen names of folks I ought to follow up on. Some were familier: Pochhacker, Toury, Seleskovitch. Others I recognized after she wrote them down: Vuorikoski (I have one article by her, I think), and Morven Beaton (I remember at least an hour with the librarian trying to track down her work). I’m not sure about Kaisa Koskinen . . . perhaps.

I pitched Blommaert to her, especially his work on voice, which he argues is the proper object of critique in critical discourse analysis: “Voice stands for the way in which people manage to make themselves understood or fail to do so. In doing so, they draw upon and deploy discursive means which they have at their disposal, and they have to use them in contexts that are specified as to conditions of use. Consequently, if these conditions are not met, people ‘don’t make sense’ – they fail to make themselves understood – and the actual reasons for this are manifold” (Blommaert 2005: 4-5).

We had quite the animated conversation (helped along, no doubt, by caffeine and chocolate).

Here’s as good a place as any to post these notes on language, interpreting, and meaning (since that is the gist of what we discussed):

From , fiction by Barry Unsworth:

"Community interpreting," said one interpreter educator, "is a condensed form of all the communication problems that can happen between people. It can teach you a lot about what it means to be a human being."

Amitav Ghosh on interpreting (excerpts from The Hungry Tide).