Deaf Interpreters at Work: International Insights

Deaf and Hearing Interpreting Team Preparation: A Study Using Conversation Analysis

90 Deaf and Hearing Interpreting Team Preparation: A Study Using Conversation Analysis Brenda Nicodemus and Marty M. Taylor Conversation is fundamental.We use conversation to act in the world— to order a cup of coffee, to run a meeting, to build friendships, and to work with others. It is precisely because of its crucial role in our personal, political, and professional lives that conversation deserves serious examination . What expectations do individuals bring to their conversations? Why do some conversations create a sense of collaboration while others lead to conflict? Do conversations have predictable structures, and, if so, what are they? Analyzing these and other topics has been an interdisciplinary endeavor with investigations conducted by psychologists, sociologists, and linguists (Taylor & Cameron, 1987). The answers have critical implications for many types of occupations, and especially so for interpreters who work between speakers of different languages. For interpreters, understanding how conversations are structured is an essential aspect of their professional practice. Interpreters spend their working lives in the thick of conversations, bombarded with talk that must be decoded in order to re-create nuanced meanings in a wide variety of settings, including education, legal, business, and healthcare environments. Recognizing patterns and regularities in discourse strengthens interpreters’ ability to accurately render propositions from the source language into the target language (Adamowicz, 1989; Chernov, 1994). For this reason, many interpreter education programs focus heavily on discourse analysis in various forms (e.g., monologues, dyads, groups) and institutional settings (e.g., schools, hospitals, courtrooms ) and as shaped by personal attributes (e.g., age, gender, socioeconomic status). There are now both scholarly and popular publications that can inform interpreters’ understanding of discourse (see, for example , Stubbs, 1983; Tannen, 1986, 1990, 1994, 2006). Conversational exchanges are not produced in a random fashion; rather, they are consciously constructed by using a series of fairly Deaf and Hearing Interpreting Team Preparation : 91 predictable interactional units (Stubbs, 1983). Further, conventional “rules” determine when these interactional units occur, how they are recognized, and how they fit into the overall organization of shared discourse (Sidnell, 2010). These interactional units and rules do not restrict the conversational process; on the contrary, individuals deploy these structures as a reliable means to provide a sense of “orderliness in the social world” (Liddicoat, 2007, p. 11). In this chapter we examine interpreters and conversational discourse from a novel perspective. Rather than focusing on how interpreters render other people’s discourse, we examine the internal discourse created by ASL-English interpreters engaged in professional conversation when working as a team. Many people assume that interpreters work in isolation; however, it has been estimated that at least 30% of interpreters’ work is performed with other colleagues (Hoza, 2010). Team interpreting involves two or more practitioners working collaboratively to construct a single message. Because individual team members have their own experiences and expectations about how to manage the interpreted interaction, team interpreters typically have one or more preparation sessions before the event to facilitate the process. The interpreters may talk about an array of topics in their preparation session, but Hoza (2010) identifies five items that are typically discussed: (1) who will interpret for which participants, (2) how to produce an equivalent target language message during the event, (3) when and how to relay (“feed”) information to one another, (4) how to process information, and (5) how to negotiate the physical setup of the assignment. The manner in which the preparation session unfolds has social and professional consequences for interpreters; the discussion may enhance the likelihood of a successful team experience, or it may result in feelings of tension—even hostility—between team members. Inevitably, challenges, both linguistic and interpersonal, arise during the interpreting process, and, if the conditions for effective team interpreting have not been established in advance, the interpretation may be negatively affected. The preparation session provides the team members with an opportunity to converse about the content of the upcoming assignment and, perhaps more critically, to build social rapport with one another. Various aspects of the preparation process have received attention, including negotiating the parameters for working in a team (Hoza, 2010), predicting the specific needs in the setting (Cumsky Weiss, 2003; Tinsley, 2003), and developing a sense of team unity (Jones, 2007). To date, however, 92 : Brenda Nicodemus and Marty M. Taylor authentic conversations during team interpreting preparation sessions have not been well studied. In this chapter we explore how conversation unfolds in a...