Dialogue interpreting on television: How do interpreting students learn to perform?

Television is one of Dialogue Interpreting’s privileged settings. Televised talk show interaction is show aimed at entertaining off-screen viewers. The very existence of an off-screen audience affects every action performed by on-screen interlocutors, whose primary goal is providing entertainment. Interpreters actively participate in the interaction, co-constructing it together with host and guest(s). Television interpreters divest themselves of their traditional invisibility and acquire a higher degree of autonomy, although still abiding by the show and entertainment principles. The pedagogic relevance of our data is its awareness-raising potential on the additional challenge represented by the interpreter acting as onscreen participant, thus encouraging students’ critical reasoning and stimulating meta-translational and interactional observations rather than a merely lexical and propositional analysis of the interpreter’s turns.