Sociolinguistics in Interpreting Research

Acknowledging the role of factors that can be labelled as subjective and contextual in the production of original or interpreted oral text, several interpreting studies researchers have opted for an integration of different techniques and methodologies of data collection and analysis that can be loosely termed as sociolinguistic. Such authors have thus in fact reached a level of interdisciplinarity, whether openly acknowledged or not, which can now serve as a platform for holistic attempts at describing a linguistic, semiotic and social phenomenon as complex and multifaceted as mediated interaction. To name but a few, Cecilia Wadensjö (e.g. 2001) integrates conversation and discourse analysis in her study of dialogue interpreting in institutional contexts. Claudia Angelelli (2003 and 2004) uses questionnaires – a sociolinguistic and ethnolinguistic technique – in her survey of community and conference interpreters. Ebru Diriker (2004) exposes the delusory nature of objectivity claims in conference interpreting studies and adopts the openly political perspective of critical discourse analysis, incorporating concepts from cultural and gender studies as well as ethnolinguistic and sociolinguistic techniques such as interviews and field observation. Such famous examples show how productive and fruitful interdisciplinary approaches to IS can be. In the first section of this paper a tentative definition of sociolinguistics as used in interpreting studies will be provided, and the applications of sociolinguistics to interpreting research will be compared with discourse analysis and approaches exclusively focusing on conversation analysis. The second section, structured as a literature review, contains a literature review of sociolinguistic approaches applied to the analysis of recorded data in the neutrality/non-neutrality discourse.