A Multidisciplinary Theoretical Framework for the Study of Remote Interpreting

Telephone interpreting (TI) is a form of interpreter-mediated cross-cultural interaction, which takes place in conditions affected by the medium, hence its definition as a form of “technologized interaction”. This highlights the need for the interplay of a variety of relevant disciplines to develop a theoretical framework to study and teach remote interpreting. The paper suggests and discusses four relevant paradigms of reference: (i) Ethnography of speaking which provides conceptual categories aimed at identifying similarities and dissimilarities with other types of social speaking activities; (ii) “Technologized interaction” which adds a sociological perspective to the use of video and the telephone as technologies for communication through interpreting; (iii) Telephone Conversation Analysis which highlights the pragmatic and discursive implications of TI´s linguistic and paralinguistic dimensions - additionally, its methodological apparatus offers a comprehensive system of transcription conventions; and (iv) Prosody in Conversation and Phonetics to account for the no-verbal dimension.