March 2006
Baker, Mona. 2006. Contextualization in translator- and
interpreter-mediated events. Journal of
Pragmatics 38:3. 321-337.
Abstract. The notion of context has been
extensively invoked but rarely critiqued and elaborated in the study of
translation and interpreting. This paper first explores recent thinking on the
notions of context and contextualization in pragmatics and linguistic
anthropology and examines the extent to which these notions have explicitly or
implicitly informed current thinking on translation and interpreting. It then
argues that closer attention to processes of contextualization in both the
production and reception of translated texts and interpreted utterances can
tell us much more about the goals and ideological positioning of participants
than any static listing of contextual variables, however detailed and
comprehensive. The discussion is supported by various examples of the way in
which translators and interpreters frame their interaction with others.
Cho, Sangeun.
*A TAP study with professional translators,
translation students and language learners translating from Japanese into
Korean.
House, Juliane. 2006. Text and context in translation. Journal of Pragmatics 38:3. 338-358.
Abstract. While research on texts
as units larger than sentences has a rich tradition in translation studies, the
notion of context, its relation to text, and the role it plays in translation
has received much less attention. In this paper, I make an attempt at
rethinking the relationship between context and text for translation. I first
review several conceptions of context and the relationship between text and
context in a number of different disciplines. Secondly, I present a theory of
translation which is to be understood as a theory of re-contextualization that
explicates the relationship between context and text in its design and categorial scheme. Finally, I sketch a recent development
in translation and multilingual text production, which may limit the scope of
re-contextualization in translation.
Kim, Haeyoung.
* Suggestions for text
analysis in a didactic setting for undergraduate students on the basis of Hallidayan field, mode and tenor concepts with an example
taken from translation work of an economics text.
Marins, Katrijn. 2006. The Asylum Speaker. Language in the Belgian Asylum Procedure.
*
Drawing on first-hand ethnographic data, field interviews with interpreters,
interviewers and decision-makers, observations and off-record comments, The
Asylum Speaker examines discursive processes in the asylum procedure and the impact
these processes may have on the determination of refugee status. The book
starts from the assumption that far-reaching legal decisions often have to be
made on very limited grounds. Unable to submit any evidence to substantiate
their case, the only chance that many asylum seekers have is to argue their
case during the oral hearings with public officials at the different asylum
agencies. Maryns investigates the performance of the
asylum seeker during these interviews and analyzes the relationship between
narrative structuring and gradations of linguistic competence. She explores a
number of related questions: first, how the interaction between applicants and
public officials proceeds; second, how this interaction
forms the discursive input into long and complicated textual trajectories, and
third, how the outcome of these discursive processes affects the assessment of
asylum applications.
Maryns demonstrates how
propositional aspects play a crucial role in the asylum procedure whereas
little attention is paid to narrative-linguistic diversity and multilingual
speaker repertoires. Her analysis reveals how insufficient insight into the
linguistic structure and narrative features of the asylum account often results
in a deficient processing of important details.
Mason, Ian. 2006. On mutual
accessibility of contextual assumptions in dialogue interpreting. Journal of Pragmatics 38:3. 359-373.
Abstract. The fundamental
determinacy of linguistically encoded meaning has remained as a tacit
assumption underlying much work in the study of interlingual
interpreting and interpreter behaviour. When
confronted with the real-time, on-line nature of interpreter-mediated crosscultural encounters, however, such a view rapidly
becomes untenable and an alternative model of the retrieval and representation
of meanings becomes necessary. Adopting a relevance theoretic account of
interpreter-mediated communication but also drawing on some insights from
conversation analysis, this article examines evidence of participant moves –
and particularly interpreter moves – to show inferencing
at work and the evolving, intra-interactional nature
of context. Indeed, a central contention is that interpreters’ performance can
provide explicit evidence of take-up, of the sense they make of others’ talk
and how they respond to it, in a process of joint negotiation of contextual
assumptions. However, whereas mutual accessibility of such assumptions would
seem to be a precondition for establishing relevance, the evidence presented
here suggests that divergent contexts may emerge among participants, even
though the ‘speech-exchange system’ (Schegloff, 1999)
of interpreter mediation appears to proceed in an unproblematic way.
Pérez González,
Luis. 2006. Interpreting
strategic recontextualization cues in the courtroom:
Corpus-based insights into the pragmatic force of non-restrictive relative
clauses. Journal of Pragmatics 38:3. 390-417.
Abstract. In recent decades,
studies of the pragmatics of institutional interaction have enhanced our
awareness of the ongoingly negotiated nature of
context. In this paper, key concepts of the contextualization paradigm, adopted
from socio-pragmatics, are outlined and subsequently discussed in the context
of courtroom interpreting. Of particular interest here is the fact that
interpreters are ethically constrained not to alter the pragmatics of the
ongoing interaction, which ultimately presupposes their capacity to identify
the contextualization cues with which different participants realign themselves
as required. The paper focuses on the notion of ‘strategic’ or ‘covert recontextualization cues’, as illustrated by lawyers’ use
of non-restrictive relative clauses. Data from two different corpora provide
some evidence of the use of these structures as pragmatically consequential
devices, thus challenging the commonly held assumption that non-restrictive
relative clauses are only used to ‘add information’. I argue that the
evaluative role of such covert cues enables lawyers to step out of the
interrogator/interrogated frame in order to secure certain alignments on the
part of the defendant or witness; the success or failure of this strategy
depends on the interpreter recognizing the pragmatic force of these cues and
rendering it accurately into the target language.