Who defines role?
Negotiation and collaboration between non-professional interpreters and primary participants in prison
settings
This article analyzes the communicative behaviors of non-professional interpreters and primary
participants in the context of therapy/counseling sessions in a prison setting. It describes the negotiation and
collaboration patterns established among all members of the communicative triad in order to co-construct the
interpreter’s role dialogically, in a corpus of 26 mental health interviews in a prison setting between
therapists/counselors and allophone prisoners, with other inmates as interpreters. Using Goffman’s (1981) concept of footing as the main analytical tool, it sheds light on the
conversational strategies that all members of the triad use to initiate, accept, or resist the interpreter’s shifts to
different footings, especially those that depart most dramatically from widely accepted “translator” ones.
Article outline
- Introduction
- The issue of role in interpreting ethics
- Ethical principles of interpreting and the invisibility myth
- Role as a dynamic entity
- Footing as a dynamic concept
- Non-professional interpreters and the question of role
- Material and method
- Analysis
- Types of footing shifts in this analysis
- How do footing shifts start?
- Shifts initiated by the primary participants
- Shifts initiated by the NPI: The influence of social and institutional factors
- Negotiation and collaboration strategies over the interpreter’s footing
- Conclusion
- Notes
-
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