Interpreting in the Media: Organisational, Interactional and Discursive Aspects of Dialogue Interpreting in Radio Settings: A Study of Spain's Radio 3

Abstract

This thesis aims to uncover and explain how interpreter-mediated live interviews work in radio broadcasting, from organisational, interactional and discursive points of view. The initial premise is that there are specific features and patterns of broadcast talk-in-interaction when they take place in interpreter-mediated radio settings which have been explored neither in Interpreting Studies, Media Studies nor Conversation Analysis (CA) as yet. Consequently, I also aim at revealing modifications and adjustments to the broadcast talk practices and organisation of broadcast events, as well as how the interpreter's interaction is influenced by this institutional context in comparison with other contexts.

The thesis is structured as follows: chapters I, II and III include critical literature reviews of the key areas of my research, i.e. dialogue interpreting, media interpreting and conversation analysis, respectively. The methodology (chapter IV) involves a mixed model which is applied to five interpreter-mediated interviews broadcast on Radio 3's El Séptimo Vicio (ESV), from the Spanish State Broadcasting Company, RNE (chapter V). This model includes a descriptive framework of types of interpreter-mediated interviews, to which Conversation Analysis (CA) is applied, in order to shed light on the organisation of such events, as well as specific interactional phenomena and patterns arising in this particular type of interpreter- mediated event. Audiovisual recordings of one of the broadcasts and a semi-structured interview with the host of ESV are used as corroboration for the CA. The language combinations of the five interpreter-mediated interviews under study are Spanish-French, Spanish-English (2 interviews), Spanish-Italian and Spanish-Farsi, respectively.

Findings and concluding remarks of the thesis (chapter VI) focus on the ‘unique fingerprint’ (Heritage and Clayman, 2010:18) of practices and interactions analysed in my data. The findings include (1) a detailed account of the specificity of the organisation and production of broadcast events when interpreters are required in interviews. Radio 3's communicative ethos and conventional production practices (as thoroughly analysed in this thesis) lead to an ad hoc stage of interpreting provision, which entails a range of broad patterns of interactions and situational arrangements such as a variety of interpreting modality patterns, as well as medium-specific strategies in respect of broadcasting language transfer; (2) specific interactional features and patterns which result from the interpreter-mediated event taking place in both broad and local contexts, such as interpreters’ turn-taking devices that are closer to those of the host than the foreign language speaking guest, thus showing an adaptation to the medium; interpreters’ unchallenged omission of audience-oriented propositional and relational content when rendering the host's moves to the interviewee, and the host’s relinquishing of turns in order to avoid overlapping talk or encouraging more rapid and dynamic exchange of turns. Within the limits of what can be generalized from the analysis of a specific set of data, avenues for future research are sketched, and implications for public engagement in the form of training and knowledge exchange activities which help to consolidate the study and practice of radio interpreting as a discipline in its own right are discussed.