“It keeps me on my toes”
Interpreters’ perceptions of challenges in telephone interpreting and their coping strategies
This article reports on the findings of a questionnaire survey of 465 telephone interpreters in Australia, focusing on what they liked and disliked about telephone interpreting, their perceptions of challenges in telephone interpreting, and their coping strategies. Just over half of the respondents liked working as telephone interpreters. Results also show that interpreters identified many favourable and unfavourable aspects of telephone interpreting. A key finding is that interpreters perceived many comprehension-related challenges (e.g., poor sound quality, a lack of non-verbal information), communication-related challenges (e.g., overlapping speech), and other challenges in telephone interpreting (e.g., low remuneration, casual employment, work-related stress). Importantly, interpreters adopted various coping strategies, including using high-quality headphones and requesting briefing or clarification to deal with comprehension-related challenges, explaining the interpreter’s role and intervening with clients as necessary to address communication-related challenges, and reducing working hours and exercising self-care to manage work-related stress.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Overview
- 2.1Advantages of telephone interpreting
- 2.2Challenges in telephone interpreting
- 2.3Survey studies on telephone interpreting
- 3.The study
- 3.1Aims
- 3.2The questionnaire
- 3.3Procedure
- 4.Results and discussion
- 4.1Demographic profile
- 4.2What interpreters liked and disliked about telephone interpreting
- 4.2.1Overall opinions
- 4.2.2What interpreters liked about telephone interpreting
- 4.2.3What interpreters disliked about telephone interpreting
- 4.3Challenges in telephone interpreting
- 4.3.1Quantitative results regarding perceived challenges in telephone interpreting
- 4.3.2Qualitative results regarding perceived challenges in telephone interpreting
- Comprehension-related challenges
- Communication-related challenges
- Other challenges
- 4.4Coping strategies
- 5.Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.17012.wan
References
Cited by
Cited by 8 other publications
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 24 january 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.