Publication type: Conference paper
Type of review: Peer review (abstract)
Title: From speaker fidelity to agency in interpreting : a relevance theory account of interpreters renditions of English as a lingua franca input
Authors: Albl-Mikasa, Michaela
et. al: No
Conference details: 10th Congress of the European Society for Translation Studies (EST22), Oslo, Norway, 22-25 June 2022
Issue Date: 24-Jun-2022
Language: English
Subjects: Conference interpreting; English as a lingua franca; Relevance theory; CLINT project; Enrichment process; Agency
Subject (DDC): 418.02: Translating and interpreting
420: English
Abstract: In Déjean Le Feal’s classic definition of conference interpreting some amount of agency, which is generally attributed to community interpreting, and deviation from the conduit ideal is already factored in: “What our listeners receive through their earphones […] should have the same cognitive content and be presented with equal clarity and precision in the same type of language if not better, given that we are professional communicators, while many speakers are not, and sometimes even have to express themselves in languages other than their own” (1990: 155, my emphasis). That some amount of “improvement” is particularly relevant in non-native English speaker settings has been pointed out by Reithofer (2010: 151). While Reithofer’s PhD results show that conference participants reliance on interpretation yields better comprehension scores than direct listening to the ELF speaker, it is as yet unclear, what this “improvement” consists in or what interpreters actually do in target speech production to enable such better comprehension. Relevance Theory (RT) (Sperber/Wilson 2001) provides the tools to analyze in detail the changes interpreters make to source text input. The fleshing out of explicatures by means of enrichments, disambiguations and reference assignments is particularly transparent in mediated communication where fleshed out target speech can be compared to underspecified source speech input. From an RT perspective, interpreters, when mediating between native speakers, are meant “to convey the message to the hearers at the same level of relevance, i.e. requiring on their part no more effort for the derivation of the same contextual effects than is required of members of the audience who are listening to the Speaker directly" (Setton, 1999: 230). Under ELF conditions, however, preliminary research results suggest a need for greater agency (Albl-Mikasa 2021), which would translate into extra enrichment, disambiguation and reference assignment processes requiring additional cognitive effort. As part of a larger project on cognitive load in processing ELF input, this paper presents an RT analysis of eight professional interpreters’ renditions of ELF speaker input, demonstrating how and to what degree they "elaborate or embellish" (Setton 1999: 230), and attempting to answer the question as to whether the tenet of speaker fidelity shifts towards greater agency in conference as in community interpreting.
Further description: References: - Albl-Mikasa, Michaela (2021). English as a lingua franca: a paradigm shift for Translation & Interpreting? Slovo 12(4), forthcoming. - Déjean Le Féal, Karla 1990. Some thoughts on the evaluation of simultaneous interpretation . In D. Bowen & M. Bowen (eds) Interpreting— Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow . New York : SUNY , 154 – 160 . - Reithofer , Karin 2010 . English as a lingua franca vs. interpreting— Battleground or peaceful co- existence . The Interpreters’ Newsletter 15 , 143 – 157 . - Setton, R. (1999). Simultaneous Interpretation. A Cognitive-Pragmatic Analysis. John Benjamins. - Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (2001). Relevance: Communication and cognition (2nd ed). Blackwell Publishers.
URI: https://digitalcollection.zhaw.ch/handle/11475/26172
Fulltext version: Published version
License (according to publishing contract): Licence according to publishing contract
Departement: Applied Linguistics
Organisational Unit: Institute of Translation and Interpreting (IUED)
Published as part of the ZHAW project: Cognitive Load in Interpreting and Translation (CLINT)
Appears in collections:Publikationen Angewandte Linguistik

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Albl-Mikasa, M. (2022, June 24). From speaker fidelity to agency in interpreting : a relevance theory account of interpreters renditions of English as a lingua franca input. 10th Congress of the European Society for Translation Studies (EST22), Oslo, Norway, 22-25 June 2022.
Albl-Mikasa, M. (2022) ‘From speaker fidelity to agency in interpreting : a relevance theory account of interpreters renditions of English as a lingua franca input’, in 10th Congress of the European Society for Translation Studies (EST22), Oslo, Norway, 22-25 June 2022.
M. Albl-Mikasa, “From speaker fidelity to agency in interpreting : a relevance theory account of interpreters renditions of English as a lingua franca input,” in 10th Congress of the European Society for Translation Studies (EST22), Oslo, Norway, 22-25 June 2022, Jun. 2022.
ALBL-MIKASA, Michaela, 2022. From speaker fidelity to agency in interpreting : a relevance theory account of interpreters renditions of English as a lingua franca input. In: 10th Congress of the European Society for Translation Studies (EST22), Oslo, Norway, 22-25 June 2022. Conference paper. 24 Juni 2022
Albl-Mikasa, Michaela. 2022. “From Speaker Fidelity to Agency in Interpreting : A Relevance Theory Account of Interpreters Renditions of English as a Lingua Franca Input.” Conference paper. In 10th Congress of the European Society for Translation Studies (EST22), Oslo, Norway, 22-25 June 2022.
Albl-Mikasa, Michaela. “From Speaker Fidelity to Agency in Interpreting : A Relevance Theory Account of Interpreters Renditions of English as a Lingua Franca Input.” 10th Congress of the European Society for Translation Studies (EST22), Oslo, Norway, 22-25 June 2022, 2022.


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