Interpreters as laminated speakers: Gaze and gesture as interpersonal deixis in consecutive dialogue interpreting

• Published in: Journal of pragmatics 2021-08, Vol.181, p.83-99
• Main Authors: Vranjes, Jelena, Brône, Geert
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Deixis; Eye movements; Gaze; Gestures; Interpreters; Interpreting; Interpreting in dialogue settings; Linguistics; Multimodality; Participation; Pointing; Semiotics; Social interaction; Translation methods and strategies
• ISSN: 0378-2166; 1879-1387
• DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2021.05.008

When dialogue interpreters render an utterance from one language to the other, this can be viewed as a form of quoting. This is reflected, among others, in the principle of direct translation, according to which the rendered utterance should maximally reflect the original, including the use of the first person perspective of the primary participants. Empirical research has shown, however, that interpreters struggle with this principle and at times resort to specific strategies for stepping out of the normative first person pronoun. In the present study, we expand the focus by showing that apart from verbal resources such as quotatives, interpreters also resort to other semiotic resources such as gesture, head movements and eye gaze to mark the principal of the utterance they are rendering. Based on a corpus of video-recorded interpreter-mediated encounters, we zoom in on the use of (combinations of) different semiotic resources for the purpose of discourse structuring, disambiguation or stance-taking. The analysis reveals strategies of both multimodal layering, where verbal quotative ‘(s)he said’ is combined with a pointing gesture or gaze shift towards the principal of the utterance, and nonverbal layering, where embodied resources are mobilized as markers of layering without an accompanying verbal quotative. •Interpreter's quotative can be accompanied by other semiotic resources.•Interpreters use gaze and gesture to mark the principal of the utterance.•Gaze shift to the ‘principal’ can perform a subtle distancing function.•Deictic gesture towards the principal has a disambiguating or linking function.•There is a trade-off between speech and nonverbal resources in interpreted talk.