InDialog in Berlin

By Stacey Webb

19-21 November 2015 if you were looking for Ursula Böser, Jemina Napier, Stacey Webb, Eloisa Monteoliva Garcia or Yvonne Waddell you wouldn’t have found them around Heriot-Watt campus or anywhere in Edinburgh, as this lot was deep ‘in dialogue’ in Berlin Germany! The InDialog conference, “Community Interpreting In Dialogue With Technology” was the second InDialog conference held at Russisches Haus für Wissenschaft und Kultura. This conference is dedicated entirely to the many facets of community interpreting. Themes included, Technology & Practice; Legal Settings; Quality and Best Practice; Highly Sensitive Settings, Training for Practice; Research Methodology; Community Issues; National Perspectives; and Healthcare Settings.

Heriot-Watt staff and students are truly doing some interesting research and I am proud to work amongst them. Below is a brief description of the papers presented by LINCS colleagues.

Ursula Böser, Professor of Intercultural Studies and Languages, presented a paper aiming to contribute to the formulation of best practice in the mediated co-construction of evidence, which involves child speakers of foreign languages. Combining research findings about child interviewing and studies in face-to-face interpreting, this paper focused on the importance of engaging the minor in the interpreting process in a child-aware fashion; arguing that setting, rehearsing and maintaining ground rules of mediated communication is crucial in ensuring the integrity of interviews in the highly sensitive setting of bilingual child interviews. Drawing on the example of children to highlight the heterogeneity of profiles of non-institutional users of PSI it highlighted questions, which arise from the perspective of a specific group of users in the wider context of PSI practice and research.

Jemina Napier, Head of Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies, gave two presentations.  First she gave an overview of research findings from the Insign project she led in 2014 with other colleagues from LINCS: Prof Graham Turner and Robert Skinner. This project, funded by the Directorate General Justice of the European Commission, aimed to develop a web-based service platform, enabling European Deaf and Hard of Hearing citizens to have dialogue with EU Institutions and Members of the European Parliament in their preferred sign language.  Jemina explained that the Insign project broke ground as it was the first Video Relay Service of its kind to provide access to deaf people in more than one spoken-signed language pair.  All other services focus on national spoken and signed languages. The role of the research team was to evaluate the communicative outcomes of the Insign VRS, and they analysed recordings of VRS calls between Deaf sign language users and hearing people, as well as ethnographic observation field notes, surveys and interviews with Deaf people, interpreters, captioners/respeakers and MEPs.

Jemina’s second presentation was a co-authored presentation with Prof Lorraine Leeson from Trinity College Dublin (who was not able to be at the conference) and was on the benefits of using mixed-methods in community interpreting research.  The paper gave an overview of how the mixed-methods approach was adopted in two related studies exploring deaf people’s participation in, and access to, justice: 1) The Deaf Juror Project and 2) The Justisigns project. By using a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative and qualitative methods such as surveys, interviews, non-participant observation, simulation, discourse analysis, these researchers were able to triangulate data in each study to look at the overarching research questions from varying perspectives to provide a deeper understanding of the issues being investigated, and validating findings gleaned from different sources.  (Be sure to check out Jemina’s book, co-authored with Sandra Hale, on varying research methods to use in your interpreting related research. If you mix your methods you may find it to be very beneficial!)

Stacey Webb, Assistant Professor of Sign Language Studies, presented on her doctoral research, which explores the job demands, and job resources interpreter educators have and how they perceive such demands as influencing student learning outcomes. Through the Job Demand Resource Survey-Interpreter Educators (JDRSIE), developed by Webb based on an initial scoping study (see Webb and Napier 2015), preliminary findings show that interpreter educators do not feel they have enough time or resources to fully prepare students.  Although respondents feel they are doing the best with what they have, they also feel their students are not prepared as they should be upon graduation (e.g. 50% have agreed to passing students who were deemed not ready to advance).  Although this research explores sign language interpreters, Ineke Crezee from Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand expressed how she strongly relates to the findings of this work and hopes to see this study replicated for spoken language interpreter educators in the future.

Eloisa Monteoliva Garcia, doctoral researcher, shared her paper focusing on hybridity in a case study of interpreter-mediated police interviews. Drawing on her ongoing PhD research, she highlighted the particular ways in which triadic sequences mediated by a qualified interpreter and same-language interaction between primary participants are combined in police interviews conducted in English with Spanish-speaking suspects. Her research explores how interaction occurs when transparency is acknowledged and limited resources in the other’s languages are used even if an interpreter is present.  Thus, she presented preliminary findings of a CA-based study of multimodal interaction, and stresses the particular dynamics observed in the hybrid communicative format used in the specific context of the police interview as a discourse genre, an event that plays a vital role in the criminal process.

Yvonne Waddell, doctoral researcher, presented on an initial scoping study as part of her doctoral research. This study included participant observation methods to explore the language and communication strategies utilized by a psychiatric nurse over a 3- month period when interacting with deaf patients on his case load, who use British Sign Language (BSL) and a BSL/English Interpreter, working within a specialist mental health service for deaf people in Scotland. Two major themes emerged from her thematic analysis of her field notes and semi structured interviews: 1) The establishment and maintenance of a therapeutic relationship with Deaf patients and 2) The development of a collaborative working relationship with the interpreter.  She explains how her research may be of benefit to understanding the communicative strategies nurses use with their patients when working with an interpreter and could contribute to pedagogical practice of both psychiatric nurses and interpreters working in community mental health settings.

For more information on this Indialog conference and to learn about future conferences click here

A taste of the real thing

by Fanny Chouc

Heriot-Watt’s interpreting students were given a great opportunity to apply their skills to a real-life setting thanks to Heriot-Watt Engage. They interpreted for the Illuminations event, which was held on campus on Wednesday 02 December to mark the end of the UN Year of Light.

As part of this event, Professor Jim Al-Khalili gave a fascinating talk on the history of optics, looking at all the scientists who contributed to the build up towards our current understanding of Light. Students were given a unique chance to interpret his speech into French, Spanish, German and British Sign Language, working either in booths or in front of the stage.

All students involved have been training as interpreters, but this was, for most, their first experience outside a classroom environment. And what an experience! They provided simultaneous interpreting to a live and e-audience (the event was streamed online), in an auditorium set to welcome 450 people. A particularly daunting prospect for our BSL students, as they were facing a particularly large audience! Students in the booths also took on a challenge for their first taste of professional interpreting: they volunteered knowing that the topic would be challenging, and in some cases, they were working into their B language.

So how beneficial was this first taste of the real things? Student volunteers saw this as a very good reminder of the key skills highlighted in class, with one of them saying: “it reminded me how important it is to stay informed not only in the field of politics and current affairs but also in the field of science”.  They also valued the chance to put their skills to the test in a real, live setting, stressing that “from a learner’s point of view it was very useful to be given the chance to interpret in a professional context in front of a live audience”. And this opportunity also enabled them to make the link between preparation and the actual interpreting process.  But most importantly, they enjoyed this chance to put their skills to the test, with one of them stating that “it was fun and a great opportunity”.

The feedback from the audience was also very positive, especially considering that some of these students only started their simultaneous interpreting training three months ago: they kept going, providing a clear and lively rendition of Prof Al-Khalili’s speech in the target languages, and coming up with clever strategies to convey the sometimes technical explanations of this well-known scientist, delivering a pleasant and efficient version of the speech in the various languages.

In the end, this proved to be a very successful experience for all, and a very good warm-up in preparation for our annual multilingual debates, scheduled for Wednesday 23rd March.

The topics chosen this year are: “This House believes that new technologies are killing real human interactions” (morning debate) and “This House believes that accessing public services in your native language should be a recognized and implemented human right” (afternoon debate). And as last year, it will also be possible to follow the event online and to listen to the interpreters in the booths or watch BSL interpreters at work. Note that the BSL interpreting will be provided for the first time by Heriot-Watt students: the first ever cohort on our M.A. in BSL interpreting has reached their final year and they’ll be joining their peers in our annual events. So save the date, and check this link if you are interested in the live streaming.

 

 

Translating Cultures and the Mediation of Indigenous Rights in Peru

Raquel

While we were all busy teaching, marking papers, setting exams, attending conferences and writing papers, Dr Raquel de Pedro Ricoy spent part of the first semester in the jungle. Literally.

Raquel is working on an AHRC-funded project entitled “Translating Cultures and the Mediation of Indigenous Rights in Peru” with Prof. Rosaleen Howard (Newcastle University) and Dr Luis Andrade (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú), in partnership with the Directorate for Indigenous Languages of the Ministry of Culture and the rural development agency SER. The project looks at new state-sponsored initiatives to facilitate better communication between the Spanish-speaking majority and speakers of the many Amerindian languages of the Andean highlands and the Amazon basin. The aim of the project is to research how far translation and interpreting, in contexts of mediation between the Peruvian state and its indigenous populations, can achieve the state legislated goals of upholding indigenous rights, while also sustainably developing the resource-rich territories where the indigenous populations live Ever since the Spanish conquest, Peru’s indigenous languages have lost ground to Spanish, which dominates all fields of formal communication and is seen as having greater prestige than the local Amerindian tongues. Indigenous people often suffer discrimination on linguistic as well as sociocultural grounds. However, this situation is gradually being reversed. Languages such as Quechua and Aymara in the highlands, and Asháninka and Shipibo in the rainforest, are spoken in schools and health centres, and bilingual indigenous people are becoming trained professionals in a variety of fields. Laws passed in 2011 make translation and interpretation a right, and the government is responding by translating the laws into the native languages as well as training bilingual indigenous people to be interpreters.

This is why Raquel spent two weeks in the high jungle town of Quillabamba,where the Ministry of Culture was running a training course for speakers of indigenous languages. As part of the project, Raquel and the rest of the teamobserved the training sessions, contributed to a panel on language rights and ran a workshop with the participants on the experience of translation. The trainees were speakers of: Matsigenga, an Arawak language; Harakbut a highly endangered language spoken by just 2,800 people in Madre de Dios department; and five different varieties of the Andean language Quechua. Raquel subsequently travelled to Pucallpa, in the Peruvian western jungle, where she interviewed community leaders who had used the services of interpreters in a consultation process facilitated by the Ministry of Transport and Communications. During her stay in Lima, Raquel delivered a plenary lecture at the XII International FIT Forum and joined government representatives and legal experts for a round-table discussion on legal translation and interpreting for indigenous languages.

The team is currently working on an article about the indigenous experience of translating indigenous rights law, involving translators in the difficult task of expressing western concepts such as ´rights´ and ´law´ in their own Amazonian and Andean tongues.