Linking up with Video: Perspectives on Interpreting Practice and Research

This volume largely grows out of an international symposium, organized as part of the Meerts Chair for Specialized Communication, appointed to Franz Pöchhacker in 2016. The participants were very positive about the outcomes of the conference and expressed the will to share this knowledge in a publication. A selection of papers presented at this symposium, in combination with chapters by some invited experts in the field, will present a state of the art on digital video technology, firstly as used in various ways of distance interpreting in different domains (practice) and secondly as used in research to develop (re)new(ing) approaches and methodology. The development and widespread availability of digital technologies for capturing and transmitting visual images has revolutionized the production and consumption of media content and profoundly affected the processing of audiovisual material in all walks of life, interpreting being no exception. Whereas interpreters, for most of history, have had to be on site (working hic et nunc) so as to have access to the multimodal reality of communicative interaction, they can now gain real-time access to images from communication venues in remote locations and render their services ‘off-site’ via videoconference links. The potential and limitations of such video remote interpreting in different modes, modalities and settings are still poorly understood, and this volume will provide opportunities for stocktaking. It will do so from several perspectives. In a first theoretical part, an overview of medium and modality in Interpreting Studies will be given, as well as a taxonomic model of distance interpreting terminology. In a second part, a series of chapters focuses on professional practices across various domains, including European institutions, legal settings and healthcare interpreting and is concluded by a contribution on the role of the interpreter in different remote interpreting interactions in light of the role-space model (Llewellyn-Jones & Lee 2014). The third part of the volume zooms in on new ways in which digital video technology has been harnessed in research on interpreting, including both conceptual approaches (such as gaze and gesture analysis) and methodology such as the introduction of a methodological framework to assess the quality of remote interpreting in dialogic healthcare settings, the use of video in signed language interpreting as well as eye tracking and multimodal transcription. While the practice of video conference-based interpreting and new image-based research techniques may often have little, if any, direct interface, this book aims to foreground the links between the two, so that researchers can gain better access to authentic video material, and the new realities of remote interpreting can in turn receive the scholarly attention it requires and deserves.

ISBN:9789027261809

Publication year:2020

Accessibility:Closed