Accuracy in telephone interpreting: the case of French as a lingua franca in Finland
Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: This paper analyzes accuracy in authentic telephone-interpreting data in which the migrant and the interpreter communicate in French as a lingua franca, namely a language that is not their first language. The data consists of an interview conducted by a law-enforcement officer in Finland. The analysis is based on the ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions of language theorized within systemic-functional grammar. The analysis shows that the particularities of both telephone-mediated interpreting and lingua-franca interpreting engender significant communication problems. As a result, accuracy is not achieved, and the interpreter has to use strategies that are questionable in terms of the codes of conduct of community and legal interpreters. The interpreter is an active agent in the co-construction, maintenance, and erasure of indexical meanings such as speaker identities. In addition, due to linguistic and contextual constraints, the interpreter takes a prominent role as a coordinator of turns. The paper suggests that interpreters’ deontological codes are based on monolithic language ideologies and unrealistic expectations that should be reconsidered to correspond to the specific features of lingua franca and telephone interpreting.
Source: Työväentutkimus Vuosikirja
Author: Määttä, Simo K.
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2941579124