Corpora worth creating: A pilot study on telephone interpreting

This paper reports on the development and use of a corpus of interpreter-mediated phone calls to study features of telephone interpreting (TI) in healthcare settings. After a short introduction on TI and corpus-based studies of remote and on-site community interpreting (CI), the paper discusses ways of exploiting the corpus to analyse interpreters’ translation and coordination activities over the phone. It first shows that, notwithstanding some limitations due to data originally collected for non-linguistic purposes, even a small and raw resource can contribute to exploratory analyses of TI, using a qualitative (Conversation Analysis) approach. It then illustrates how opportunities for more systematic research are opened up by corpus annotation. The paper finally reports on some preliminary insights about linguistic and interactional aspects characterizing this type of remote interpreting and makes a tentative comparison with two on-site CI corpora, thereby paving the way to more refined and quantitative investigations.