Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Interpreters as laminated speakers: Gaze and gesture as interpersonal deixis in consecutive dialogue interpreting

2021; Elsevier BV; Volume: 181; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.pragma.2021.05.008

1879-1387

Jelena Vranjes, Geert Brône,

Language, Metaphor, and Cognition

When dialogue interpreters render an utterance from one language to the other, this can be viewed as a form of quoting. This is reflected, among others, in the principle of direct translation, according to which the rendered utterance should maximally reflect the original, including the use of the first person perspective of the primary participants. Empirical research has shown, however, that interpreters struggle with this principle and at times resort to specific strategies for stepping out of the normative first person pronoun. In the present study, we expand the focus by showing that apart from verbal resources such as quotatives, interpreters also resort to other semiotic resources such as gesture, head movements and eye gaze to mark the principal of the utterance they are rendering. Based on a corpus of video-recorded interpreter-mediated encounters, we zoom in on the use of (combinations of) different semiotic resources for the purpose of discourse structuring, disambiguation or stance-taking. The analysis reveals strategies of both multimodal layering, where verbal quotative '(s)he said' is combined with a pointing gesture or gaze shift towards the principal of the utterance, and nonverbal layering, where embodied resources are mobilized as markers of layering without an accompanying verbal quotative.