Drawing on the concept of translatorial action by Justa Holz-Mänttäri, this article sets out to analyse the role of translation in a bilingual formal meeting without any professional translation or interpreting. The analysis reveals the central role of translatorial activities: 60% of the turns include some kind of translatoriality. The chair and expert speakers stand out as producers for most of the translations. Self-translation is the most prominent form of translation, but otherwise the translator role tends to vary dynamically with the role of the source text producer. Three types of translatorial action with varying degrees of replication of content were found: duplicating, summarizing, and expanding. In the meeting context, translatorial action is the primary means of enabling participation for all, regardless of language skills or language background, and this action was used by the participants in flexible and dynamic ways.
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Havumetsä, Nina
2020. Instances of translatorial action: a journalist as a translating reporter of speech. Perspectives 28:3 ► pp. 440 ff.
Havumetsä, Nina
2023. Lexical borrowing in journalism in a time of political crisis. Perspectives 31:3 ► pp. 562 ff.
Hirvonen, Maija & Betta Saari
2022. Scripted or spontaneous? Two approaches to audio describing visual art in museums. Perspectives► pp. 1 ff.
Nissi, Riikka, Mona Blåsjö & Carla Jonsson
2023. Workplace communication in flux: from discrete languages, text genres and conversations to complex communicative situations. Applied Linguistics Review 14:4 ► pp. 679 ff.
Piekkari, Rebecca, Susanne Tietze & Kaisa Koskinen
2020. Metaphorical and Interlingual Translation in Moving Organizational Practices Across Languages. Organization Studies 41:9 ► pp. 1311 ff.
Sobesto, Joanna
2022. Re/Deconstructing voices of (female) translators: The case of Bolesława Kopelówna (1897-1961). STRIDON: Studies in Translation and Interpreting 2:2 ► pp. 75 ff.
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