Interpreting Studies

Opening the Black Box: Oral Histories of How Soldiers and Civilians Learned to Translate and Interpret During Peace Support Operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina

by Catherine Baker

This paper uses 51 oral history interviews with former military personnel, language trainers and locally-recruited... more This paper uses 51 oral history interviews with former military personnel, language trainers and locally-recruited interpreters to explore how soldiers and civilians were educated into becoming translators and interpreters who worked in support of the multi-national military force that first deployed into Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992. The peace operations took various forms as the nature of the Bosnia-Herzegovina mission changed but had a constant need for language support, which it met by combining a small number of soldiers trained in the local language(s) and a much larger number of local people with formal or informal education in English. The paper shows how different groups of people on whom the need for translation and interpreting had an impact (military linguists; military non-linguists; professional translators and interpreters; local interpreters who began work without professional training in interpreting) formed norms about the role of translators/interpreters through their education. Though each milieu led to a different translating and/or interpreting subjectivity, all language intermediaries recognised their work as a contingent and difficult activity while non-linguists were less able to conceive of language learning and translation/interpreting as more than a “black box” activity of finding equivalence. Using these findings as an illustration, the paper argues for the greater use of oral history in researching adult education and training on the grounds that an interview-based biographical approach provides insights into the long-term impact of learning.

The Role of Interactional Expertise In Interpreting: the Case of Technology Transfer In the Steel Industry

by Rodrigo Ribeiro

The Language Barrier As An Aid to Communication

by Rodrigo Ribeiro

Neue Formen der Informationsdarstellung. Die Arbeit des Simultandolmetschers unter dem Einfluss von PowerPoint

by Ulrike Oster

Oster, Ulrike (2003). “Neue Formen der Informationsdarstellung. Die Arbeit des Simultandolmetschers unter dem Einfluss von PowerPoint”. Actas del II Simposio sobre Traducción e Interpretación del/al Alemán (STIAL), Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca. 156-162.

Wie wir auch bei den verschiedensten Veranstaltungen in der Universität feststellen können, finden Programme wie... more Wie wir auch bei den verschiedensten Veranstaltungen in der Universität feststellen können, finden Programme wie PowerPoint eine immer weitere Verbreitung. Dadurch ändern sich in gewisser Weise auch die Formen der Informationsdarstellung auf Kongressen und Tagungen. Die Beliebtheit dieser Programme liegt sicherlich daran, dass sie eine Erleichterung von Vorbereitung und Vortrag für den Redner sowie des Verstehens seitens des Publikums mit sich bringen. Wird bei diesen Veranstaltungen mit mehreren Sprachen gearbeitet, so kommt auch der Dolmetscher (als Hörer und als Sprecher) in den Genuss dieser Vorzüge. So klingen PowerPoint-gestützte Vorträge oft spontaner und sind aufgrund ihres Rhythmus angenehm zu dolmetschen. Jedoch ist die Verdolmetschung dieser Art von Vorträgen mit eine Reihe von zusätzlichen Schwierigkeiten und Gefahren verbunden, deren sich der Dolmetscher bewusst sein muss, um angemessen reagieren zu können. Ich möchte in diesem Beitrag untersuchen, in welcher Weise sich PowerPoint auf die Vortragsweise des Redners und auf den Verstehensprozess der Hörer auswirken kann, und wie sich die Situation verändert, wenn eine oder gar mehrere zusätzliche Sprachen ins Spiel kommen (besonders im Fall von weniger verbreiteten Sprachen wie dem Deutschen). Abschließend gehe ich darauf ein, mit welchen Strategien der Dolmetscher diesen Schwierigkeiten begegnen kann, um das Verständnis der Zuhörer zu sichern.

La problemática de los números en la interpretación

by Ulrike Oster

Oster, Ulrike (1996). "La problemática de los números en la interpretación". En II Congrés internacional sobre traducció. Barcelona: Universi¬tat Autònoma de Barcelona, Departament de Traducció i Comunicació. 161-170.

Van De Mieroop, D. (2012). The Quotative ‘He/She Says’ in Interpreted Doctor-Patient Interaction. Interpreting. An International Journal of Research and Practice in Interpreting, 14 (1): 91-116.

by Dorien Van De Mieroop

Van De Mieroop, D., Bevilacqua, G., Van Hove, L. (2012). Negotiating discursive norms: Community interpreting in a Belgian rest home. Interpreting. An International Journal of Research and Practice in Interpreting, 14 (1): 23-54.

by Dorien Van De Mieroop

The Care and Feeding of Linguists: The Working Environment of Interpreters, Translators, and Linguists During Peacekeeping in Bosnia-Herzegovina

by Catherine Baker

War and Society 29:2 (2010): 154-75

The history of war and peacekeeping has little to say about languages or the people who work with them, yet a closer... more The history of war and peacekeeping has little to say about languages or the people who work with them, yet a closer inspection shows that contacts between different languages and the presence of an interpreter were a routine experience during the peacekeeping and peace-building operations conducted by the UN and NATO in Bosnia-Herzegovina. This paper shows how political, strategic, tactical, and economic pressures affected the working lives of local civilians employed as interpreters/translators/linguists and the soldiers from the multinational force who served as military interpreters. In so doing, it argues that the history of interlingual communication deserves to be included in the history of conflict.

"It's not their Job to Soldier': Distinguishing Civilian and Military in Soldiers' and Interpreters' Accounts of Peacekeeping in 1990s Bosnia-Herzegovina

by Catherine Baker

Journal of War and Culture Studies 3:1 (2010): 137-50

Peacekeeping operations throw the use of specialized military forces and the aim of accomplishing change in a civilian... more Peacekeeping operations throw the use of specialized military forces and the aim of accomplishing change in a civilian environment into contradiction. Organizations with cultures that facilitate warfighting have to reorient themselves towards achieving peace and consent rather than victory, making peacekeeping a process of constant intercultural encounters between ‘military’ and ‘civilian’ as well as between ‘international’ and ‘local’. The force’s local employees, civilians necessary in the force’s military tasks, inhabited a particularly ambiguous position. Based on more than 30 oral history interviews with peacekeepers and local interpreters who worked in Bosnia-Herzegovina, this paper shows how four dimensions of cultural and bodily difference emerged from their narratives: uniforms, weapons, disruptiveness and training.

Tito’s children?: educational resources, language learning and cultural capital in the life histories of interpreters working in Bosnia-Herzegovina

by Catherine Baker

Sudosteuropa 59:4 (2011): 477-501.

The foreign military forces and international organisations that have operated in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) since 1992... more The foreign military forces and international organisations that have operated in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) since 1992 recruited thousands of local people, often young students, to work as interpreters. Drawing on 31 life history interviews conducted in 2009–10 with language workers who grew up in former Yugoslavia, this paper seeks to answer whether certain age groups and social strata that emerged from socialist Yugoslav society were better able to benefit in the ‘SFOR economy’ that resulted from the effects of international intervention in BiH. In the process, it combines applied-linguistics approaches to language-learning narratives with area-studies perspectives on postsocialism to show how particular forms of language learning equipped people to adjust to the socio-economic crisis. Although all Bosnian schools taught foreign languages, pupils were assigned arbitrarily to different languages and English was not available in all schools. This study suggests on a limited sample that education outside the state classroom was a more helpful source of the necessary cultural capital to work as an interpreter and was easiest to access for children of urban professional families. The interpreting jobs that these subjects found during and after the war made them more privileged than workers on local-currency wages but less privileged compared to their parents’ pre-war lives. The work-based identity they went on to construct was informal and has not produced a public narrative that constructs interpreters as a recognised social group.

Boyd & Monacelli-Genre in:exclusion and Recontextualization

by Michael S. Boyd

Co-authored with Claudia Monacelli
Draft only
To be published In K. J. Kellet Bidoli (Ed), Interpreting Across Genres: Multiple Research Perspectives. Trieste: EUT (Edizioni Università di Trieste), pp. 184-200. 2012

This chapter describes the nature of interpreting in military/diplomatic contexts at the Italian Ministry of Defence... more This chapter describes the nature of interpreting in military/diplomatic contexts at the Italian Ministry of Defence (MoD) and it is particularly interested in the role played by genre in this context. In terms of diplomacy-level military discourse, we offer an overview of some important genres that are part of the job profile of MoD staff and freelance interpreters. Specifically, we focus on the “hyper-genre” (Giltrow / Stein 2009) of Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and some related texts, genres and situations, which are combined in various ways to form “genre chains” (Fairclough 2003). Our main hypothesis is that MoD professionals are involved in genre-building and propagation. This hypothesis is premised on the notion that genre and context awareness are crucial to interpreters’ success. We argue that interpreters in a military-diplomatic situation assume varying degrees of responsibilities in genre dissemination and recontextualization (Boyd / Monacelli 2010).

Across languages and cultures: Brokering problems of understanding in conversational repair

by Galina Bolden

Bolden, G. (2012). Across languages and cultures: Brokering problems of understanding in conversational repair. Language in Society, 44(1): 97-121.

Politics, (con)text and genre: applying CDA and DHA to interpreter training

by Michael S. Boyd

Co-authored with Claudia Monacelli
Published in 'The Interpreters’ Newsletter' 16, pp. 51-70. 2010

This study proposes the application of a number of important tenets from Critical Discourse Analysis, specifically the... more This study proposes the application of a number of important tenets from Critical Discourse Analysis, specifically the Discourse-Historical Approach, to interpreter studies and training. It recognizes the crucial distinctions of text, discourse and genre in the sphere of politics and proposes a multi-layered interdisciplinary model of context to analyze source texts. The application of the model is illustrated on three political speeches that share the pro-active discourse of climate change.

Gli sbocchi professionali del mediatore linguistico

by Roberto Bertozzi

in A. MARIANI - F. MARRONI (a cura di), L'arguta intenzione. Studi in onore di Gabriella Micks, Napoli, Liguori, 2007, pp. 317-337

And the Oscar goes to…: A study of the simultaneous interpretation of humour at the Academy Awards Ceremony

by Rachele Antonini

The translation and/or rendering of humour into another language is a particularly difficult task for any translators.... more The translation and/or rendering of humour into another language is a particularly difficult task for any translators. When humour depends on cultural references and linguistic effect, conveying it into a different language is particularly difficult. In such cases, humour needs to be changed radically in order to trigger an equivalent effect - something which is very difficult, if not impossible, in simultaneous interpreting. In the case of the simultaneous interpreting of television programmes for a live audience, this task is made even more problematic. The present paper aims at providing an analysis of the perception of interpreted humour during the live broadcast of the Academy Awards Ceremony in Italy. Interpreters normally have too little time to find a satisfying alternative solution. For media interpreters, given the very nature of entertainment on TV, this task is made more complicated by the speed of on-screen dialogues and the stress involved in media interpreting. For this reason, they need to follow the TV host, word by word, in order to ensure they do not miss the punch line or the start of the following joke, or to avoid mistiming their interpretation and making it coincide with a subsequent joke, causing confusion in the audience. Against this background, this paper will analyse the reactions of a sample of Italian TV viewers to the translated humour of the Academy Awards Ceremony, better known as "The Oscar Night."

El EEES y las nuevas tecnologías aplicadas a la enseñanza de la interpretación

by María Brander de la Iglesia

Sign language and interpretation.

by Christopher Stone

Stone C (2010). Sign language and interpretation. In: JH Stone, M Blouin, editors. International Encyclopedia of Rehabilitation. Available online:

This article addresses some of the uniqueness and many of the similarities between working as a sign language... more This article addresses some of the uniqueness and many of the similarities between working as a sign language interpreter and working as a public service interpreter in the UK. It gives a brief introduction to the history of the British Deaf community and the genesis of modern day British Sign Language (BSL). It then introduces the ever expanding areas where interpreters work and gives some examples of the care needed when working in the medical domain. It gives examples of the types of intercultural sensitivity needed by sign language interpreters and the pragmatic relevance needed in their renderings into English and BSL. Finally, it demonstrates that working with the British Deaf community is much like working with any minority language/group in the UK.

Deaf Translators/Interpreters’ renderings processes - The translation of Oral languages

by Christopher Stone

Stone C. (2007) Deaf Translators/Interpreters’ renderings processes - The translation of Oral languages, The Sign Language Translator and Interpreter, 1 (1), 53-72.

The rendering of English to BSL within television settings provides us an opportunity to identify ways in which... more The rendering of English to BSL within television settings provides us an opportunity to identify ways in which written languages are translated into oral languages (Ong 1982, Furniss 2004), using Kade’s definition (cited in Pöchhacker, 2004) as a starting point. The distribution of blinks is compared in Deaf and hearing Translator/Interpreters to illuminate the role of preparation and rehearsal. Think-aloud-protocols are used to explore whether differences between the two groups point to a contrast between translation and interpretation processes.

DUMB O JEMMY and others: Deaf people, interpreters and the London courts in the 18th and 19th centuries

by Christopher Stone

Stone C & Woll B (2008) DUMB O JEMMY and others: Deaf people, interpreters and the London courts in the 18th and 19th centuries, Sign Language Studies, 8 (3), 226 - 240

Much of the literature on British Sign Language (BSL)/ English interpreters in the United Kingdom suggests that the... more Much of the literature on British Sign Language (BSL)/ English interpreters in the United Kingdom suggests that the use of the term “interpreter” arose only in the late twentieth century and that, before this time, hearing children of Deaf parents, other family members, missionaries, religious workers, and (recently) social workers undertook this role in legal and other settings (Brennan and Brown 1997; Scott-Gibson 1991). In a report of a study of communication support for deaf job seekers, Allsop, Reilly, and Kyle (2005) quote a Deaf respondent: “I got my job from the missioner—the old-fashioned system to help Deaf people. . . . But now interpreters—it is too much for me and interpreters have to make me say something but I don’t know what to say” (52). With “Proceedings of the Old Bailey” now online (Hitchcock and Shoemaker), we can look closely at deaf people’s experiences, including the use of sign language and interpreters in the criminal courts, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Interpreting at the Old Bailey

by Christopher Stone

Woll B & Stone C (2008). Interpreting at the Old Bailey. Deaf History Journal 12 (1), 8-17