Chapter published in:
Teaching Dialogue Interpreting: Research-based proposals for higher education
Edited by Letizia Cirillo and Natacha Niemants
[Benjamins Translation Library 138] 2017
► pp. 259–274

Chapter 13
Non-verbals in dialogue interpreter education

Improving student interpreters’ visual literacy and raising awareness of its impact on interpreting performance

Dialogue interpreter education has paid little attention to the importance of non-verbal clues in interaction. This paper reports on an experiment at Ghent University where student interpreters were asked to perform a set of activities aiming at raising awareness of the importance of non-verbal behaviour for the co-construction of meaning in interpreter-mediated interaction. At the end of the experiment the students reported that they had become more aware of the impact of their own and others’ non-verbal clues in the co-construction of meaning during interaction.
Keywords: non-verbal, visual literacy, gaze, facial expressions, Dutch/Russian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Incorporating VL into the dialogue interpreter education through the arts
  • 3.The experiment
    • 3.1Talking art
    • 3.2Voice-me-over!
    • 3.3Mind the gap!
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1What the students learned from the experiment
    • 4.2Implications for educating dialogue interpreters
    • 4.3Limitations of the experiment
Published online: 19 October 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.138.13kry