New perspectives and challenges for interpretation: The example of television

Technological progress and globalization processes are radically changing traditional working models – including those for professional intercultural mediation. This also affects all forms of written and oral translation, e.g.for terrestrial or satellite-broadcast television programmes. This aspect ist often neglected by international and intercultural communication studies. As translation is at the same time an agent and a symptom of linguistic and cultural exchange (and change), it is important to state the social and ethical responsibility involved in its use, and the consequent need to improve our understanding of its working mechanisms. The author is conducting a study on the modalities of oral interlingual mediation used in Italian television since the sixties. The project aims at the collection of a corpus of examples of tv-interpreting and its analysis for descriptive and didactic purposes. The theoretical background is a pragmatic approach to interpreting as a complex and ‚artificial‘ comunication phenomenon and a social phenomenon with multiple economic and sociological implications. In previous research television interpreting has often been considered simply as a variety of conference interpreting performed under severer circumstances, in spite of the profoundly different performances expected from television interpreters. The theses of the author are that: television interpreting is substantially different from interpreting in traditional conference settings (and, on the other hand, from ordinary face-to-face communication); most of the specific differences between traditional interpreting and television interpreting have not yet been sufficiently investigated; the norms of behaviour internalised by professional conference interpreters are not always adequate to television communication, and this can even lead to conflicts about the perception of interpretation quality. The characteristics of interpreter-mediated discourse in tv are analyzed according to eight categories recognized by Hymes as variables pertaining to every form of comunication event and identified by the acronym SPEAKING (situation, participants, ends, act sequeces, key, instrumentralities, norms of interaction e genres). The main differences of television interpreting versus more traditional form of interpreting are related to the loss of interpersonal character of communication; the reproducibility of oral discourse in the age of electronic media; staging (where the selection of viewpoints and the restructuring of discourse implicitly include a pre-selection of meaning); the secondary character of orality on television, conflicting with the interpreter’s genuine fresh talk; and the loss of a clear-cut profile of the type of mediation and mediators required.