Prologue Interpreting for people who do not speak a common language is a lin guistic and social act of communication, and the interpreter's role in this process is an engaged one, directed by knowledge and understanding of the entire communicative situation, including fluency in the languages, competence in appropriate usage within each language, and in manag ing the cross-cultural flow of talk. Within the last decade, researchers have begun to examine the process of interpreting as embedded within a process of verbal interaction, a conversational process of people talking to each other through an interpreter, or, as I will call it here, a discourse process. Although the term discourse has come into wide use and is associated with a variety of disciplines, we get the first use of the term from linguistics (Harris 1952). In linguistics, discourse analysis is a fa miliar term generated from several branches of linguistics, often referring to analyzing "language beyond the sentence." This book is about applying the linguistic approaches of dis course analysis to the analytical study of interpreting-about studying interpreting-as discourse, a process of conversational exchanges between two primary speakers and through an interpreter. It is also about examin ing how an interpreter manages the discourse process between two par ticipants who do not speak the same language. The goals of this book are threefold: to offer a definition of interpreted events in general based on a discourse framework; to describe, analyze, and interpret the turn-taking exchanges in one interpreted event; and to discuss, from the analysis of one role performance, an interpreter's role as it is performed in interaction with others. In exploring how one interpreter manages the flow of talk, one basic, crucial system was examined in detail: the turn exchange system. Exchanging turns is at the heart of the way people talk back-and-forth to each other. How turns operate and how people take speaking turns in ordinary conversational discourse has been studied frequently in linguistic approaches to discourse, and these findings are applied here. In this study, I show that the two primary speakers take turns with the interpreter and that they participate in creating turns. The inter preter also participates in the process by creating and resolving turn phenomena, such as silence, pauses, and simultaneous talk. The inter preting event itself is influenced by both linguistic and social factors, such as the status of the participants, levels of indirectness, and explicit understanding of the progression of talk. I demonstrate that interpreters are full-scale participants in face-to-face interpreting who can influence both the direction and outcome of an interpreted event. Examining turns during an interpreted conversation offers a rela tively new empirical insight into interpreting as an interdependent, ex change process that has unique and complex features. It is a process that requires interpreter participation in organizing and managing the ex change of turns. And it requires exploring an interpreted event as a social, linguistic act governed primarily by social roles and goals during the act of communication. Discourse and Interpreting By the mid-1980s, linguistic studies in discourse could be found in areas such as sociolinguistics, ethnography, and conversational analysis. Al though these areas differ in some of their underlying assumptions about language, about units of language as data, about ways of analyzing data, and about notions of context, they also manifest important similarities. These similarities form a central set of unifying principles for the aca demic study of discourse (Schiffrin 1994). Many of these principles—such as using natural conversational data, searching and analyzing recurring patterns across speech, discover ing how participants experience conversation, and exploring social and cultural factors that influence how and what people say—are some of the hallmarks of discourse analysis. Because interpreters are interpreting dis course, or conversations, they are participating in a process that has been studied and analyzed in monolingual contexts for two decades. The in terpreted context can be recorded, studied, described, and analyzed in the same way to understand how an exchange of messages actually hap pens between two speakers of different languages. It also means that discourse analysis is a holistic way to study human communication, a field that is expanding, absorbing, interdisci plinary, and thus utterly suited for the study of interpreting. When parts of an interpreted discourse process are isolated and when structural and functional approaches are combined, then a study can both name and describe aspects of interpreting in a way that has not occurred until re cently. Such a study would also contribute to a better understanding of what components constitute interpreted events in general from what the particular description of one interpreted situation can illustrate. A basic feature of analyzing conversations, or discourse, is that speakers take turns. Most Americans assume that in taking turns one person talks, stops, and then the next person talks. But discourse studies of conversational interaction have shown that turns do not always occur as one-at-a-time rotation and that other features, such as simultaneous talking and pauses, play a role in the back-and-forth nature of conversa tion. Thus, a first step is to describe how turns occur in interpreted con versations. In any conversation, two speakers speak and they also listen. Listening is the way the next response comes about. Exchanging mes sages and keeping a conversation flowing allows no one to be passive. In a discourse process, the flow of talk and the contributions of all speakers must be considered to understand the meaning of any single utterance. In addition, speakers interact to accomplish a purpose (or pur poses). They bring with them different expectations about the way to accomplish their goals through talk. Moreover, they have different un derstandings about ways to display their intentions and to give or ac quire information as well as different ways to present themselves and their perceptions about the relationships that are present. To complicate the situation further, speakers present their ideas using different linguistic structures and also by following different auto matic and unconscious conventions for using those structures. For ex ample, inherent in language use are systems for organizing talk, such as openings and closings, turn-taking, pauses, signaling continuing thoughts, interruptions, and the presence or lack of understanding.
