The interpreter’s role in dialogue interpreting on television: A training method

The aim of the present paper is to present a three-phase training course designed for the training of talk-show interpreters. In the last few decades, Television Interpreting (TI) has been gaining momentum, as both professional practice and a research field. The great variety of communication modes, and their relevant interpreting modes, offered by interpreter-mediated televised communication has triggered an on-going discussion on the appropriateness of interpreters’ pragmatic behaviour within the TV environment. Capitalizing on studies conducted on CorIT – Television Interpreting Corpus (Straniero Sergio 2007, 2011; Falbo 2009, 2012; Straniero Sergio and Falbo 2012) and corroborating each point with examples of real-life interactions, the following training phases will be presented: in the first phase, major aspects distinguishing interpreter-mediated face-to-face interaction on TV from other forms of interpreter-mediated interaction are presented to the class, underlining the pragmatic elements that distinguish talk-show interpreters’ role and behaviour, namely interpreting as performing, face work and multiple discourse identities. In the second phase, examples of real-life interpreter-mediated talk shows are viewed and discussed, encouraging trainees to identify the pragmatic elements listed in the first phase in the praxis. Finally, in the third phase, trainees are asked to take part in a two-step role-play training experiment: firstly, an interpreter-mediated talk-show interview is simulated, with students interpreting in consecutive mode and being video-recorded. The interaction proceeds in parallel to a real-life monolingual interview, being played step by step after each exchange has been translated, following Stokoe’s (2011a, 2011b, 2013) CARM model. Secondly, students are asked to interpret the self-same interaction simultaneously, this time with the class divided into two groups, representing the Italian- and the English-speaking audiences respectively. Finally, students’ performances are discussed in terms of pragmatic behaviour and its (in)correct application, with the aim of operationalizing the feedback into a series of training cues, which later on may serve as a basis for the development of a new TI training paradigm for talk-show interpreting.