Project Details
Projekt
Turn-taking and ensuring understanding in German-Arabic telephone interpreting.
Applicant
Professor Dr. Bernd Meyer
Subject Area
General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
Term
from 2018 to 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 415671574
Telephone-based interpreting has become a widespread communicative practice in multilingual encounters, especially as a consequence of the refugee crisis and the large influx of Arabic-speaking asylum seekers. The limited availability of qualified interpreters (for the required languages) often prevent access to face-to-face interpreting services involving the co-presence of interpreter and primary interlocutors. Despite the growing need for a quick solution, the linguistic-communicative requirements for dialogue interpreting in remote mediated settings have hardly been explored. This is especially true in respect of turn-taking regularities, which in face-to-face interpreting also involves facial expressions and gesturing, as well as mechanisms to ensure (mutual) understanding, for instance queries, repetitions and explanations.The central question posed by this project is: How do the participants in interpreter-mediated counselling sessions conducted via the telephone compensate the lack of the co-presence of clients, counsellors and interpreters and which strategies are preferably employed to ensure understanding and when determining turn-taking in such exceptional circumstances? This research investigates how participants (including the interpreter) apply certain strategies to facilitate turn-taking and ensure mutual understanding among participants. Studies on consecutive dialogue interpreting reveal that interpreters play a crucial role in organising dialogues in respect of form and content including, among other things, the sequential order of dialogues (taking turns), clarification strategies and intervening through the use of different verbal cues. These coordinating actions depend on the use of verbal and nonverbal resources to which the participants in telephone conversations only have restricted access, such as interjections, utterances of listeners or gestural and mimic cues. Hence, in this project we will explore selected aspects of turn taking and processes aimed at mutual understanding within a defined setting, namely counselling refugees on their residency status, family reunification, etc. The data stems from audio and video recordings during interpreter-mediated encounters with German counsellors, Arabic speaking clients and telephone interpreters. In addition to the central research question, i.e. identifying the linguistic-communicative strategies used by interpreters to compensate the lack of the co-presence of interlocutors, this study is also guided by methodological considerations regarding the transcription of spoken Arabic. To date, it has remained unclear how German-Arabic oral data can be represented as a written and analysable text despite the technical peculiarities involved, especially the right-to-left script direction, as well as the tendency to eliminate dialectal variation in writings.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
International Connection
Italy, United Kingdom
