Multimodal Interactional Competences in Dialogue Interpreting Training

Interpreting studies have highlighted specific skills for Dialogue Interpreting (DI) when compared to Conference Interpreting. According to Wadensjö's seminal book "Interpreting as Interaction" (1998), DI is an interpreter-mediated multilingual interaction. Consequently, the interpreter plays an active role in the co-construction of meaning and in coordinating participation between primary participants who do not speak the other language (Baraldi & Gavioli, 2012). Such a role requires interactional skills. In the case of DI, they broadly include the knowledge of the socio-linguistic specificities and the setting-specific practices one may find in public service contexts, international business meetings, or in TV programmes. In all these different DI domains, participants make use of corporal nonverbal semiotic resources such as body movement, gesture, gaze and posture, also referred to as multimodal resources. The recognition that these resources play an important role in the achievement of the interpreter's coordinating task (Davitti 2019, Vranjes et al, 2019) raises the question whether they should be considered as part of interactional competences to be trained. If they are, « what are the procedures through which they can be recognized, legitimized and possibly assessed in the course of practical activities? » (Pekarek Doehler et al, 2017, p.3). DI role-plays are one example of such activities. 

In this contribution, I will present some preliminary results of a qualitative study following a multimodal conversation analysis method. The corpus consists of video-recorded French-Italian role-plays performed by 10 interpreting students. These recordings were then transcribed and annotated with ELAN[1]. I will select specific moments of the role-plays in which students make use of nonverbal bodily semiotic resources that can be considered as forms of interactional competences. I will cross reference this analysis with excerpts of semi-directed self-reflection interviews which took place with the same students 2 months after the role-plays. During these interviews, the students were given the opportunity to watch and analyse their own performance. The recording of these interviews gives access to the students' intentions and level of multimodal interactional awareness.  The aim is two-fold: to present some of the multimodal competences found in the corpus of role-plays and to show how the results of multimodal conversational analysis can help highlight hidden or unexploited interactional competences.

Baraldi, C., & Gavioli, L. (2012). Coordinating Participation in Dialogue Interpreting. John Benjamins Publishing.

Davitti, E. (2019). Methodological explorations of interpreter-mediated interaction : Novel insights from multimodal analysis. Qualitative Research, 19(1), 7‑29. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794118761492

Pekarek Doehler, S. et al. (Ed.). (2017). Interactional competences in institutional settings: From school to the workplace. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Vranjes, J., Bot, H., Feyaerts, K., & Brône, G. (2019). Affiliation in interpreter-mediated therapeutic talk : On the relationship between gaze and head nods. Interpreting, 21(2), 220‑244. https://doi.org/10.1075/intp.00028.vra 

Wadensjo, C. (1998). Interpreting As Interaction. Longman.