The interpreter's involvement in a translated institution: a case study of sermon interpreting

Identifier:  TDX:2222

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX2222

Authors:  Tison, Alev Balci

Abstract:
This thesis examines the interpreter’s involvement in the institutional context of a religious setting with an interdisciplinary and multi-method approach. Drawing on approaches from Sociology, Sociolinguistics and Translation Studies, notions such as institution, ideology, norms and context constitute a theoretical framework. A particular church in the case study is investigated as a translated and translating institution while being established in a new linguistic and cultural context, with a focus on the role of interpreters and the interpreting practice itself. The notion of involvement is scrutinized in relation to other concepts used to describe the role of the interpreter in previous research. Recognizing that interpreting can never occur in a social vacuum and that interpreters are bound by the context they mediate in, a descriptive analysis of the micro- and macro-level contexts of the research is provided as a foundation for the data analysis to follow. Interpreting at church is approached as a social practice embedded in a social institution. The study also scrutinizes the sermon as a text type and genre for a deeper understanding of the interpreter-mediated communicative events under study. Ethnography and a degree of autoethnography are employed to conduct fieldwork and to collect data for both qualitative and quantitative analyses. These analyses investigate role perceptions and expectancy norms regarding the issues such as interpreters’ motivation, eligibility, interpreting strategies, the degree of authority granted to them and their ideology-bound decisions. The findings are triangulated by a discourse analysis based on naturally occurring interpreter-mediated sermons regarding interpreters’ strategies, various degrees of their involvement in the communicative event, and their ideology-bound lexical choices in relation to process norms.