Macro social theory, linguistic ethnography and interpreting research

Moira Inghilleri

doi:10.52034/lanstts.v5i.152

Abstract

This article presents an outline of a sociological and linguistic-ethnographic perspective as applied to contexts of community interpreting. It describes a theoretical and methodological approach which, drawing on Toury ’s descriptivist theory of norms and Bourdieu ’s social reproduction theory, considers how relevant macro-social features impact on interpreting activity. This approach has as its aim to theorise configurations of the social in lo- cal interpreting contexts and to demonstrate how interpreters, as pivotal players in these contexts, are caught up in larger social configurations of power and control, both internal and external to their professional field of practice. It suggests that norms of interpreting activity and training can be linked to the wider social and political contexts of their occurrence. A descriptive language of interpreted events is developed which reflects participants’ embeddedness in social and political processes, and how this impacts on both actual and potential discursive moves within interpreted interactions. The sociological and linguistic-ethnographic perspective takes the view that what happens at the surface level of interactions is more often than not a micro drama through which a larger social and political reality is acted out in a refractedform.

Highlights

This article considers the role that sociological and linguistic-ethnographic perspectives can contribute to theoretical and methodological approaches to community interpreting research
The sociological-linguistic ethnographic perspective outlined below has as its aim to theorise configurations of the social in local interpreting contexts
Rather than taking micro-textual features per se as the primary locus of data, this approach takes the macro-social as its starting point in order to address the fundamental issue of what constraints there are on interpreting more broadly

Summary

Introduction

This article considers the role that sociological and linguistic-ethnographic perspectives can contribute to theoretical and methodological approaches to community interpreting research. The role of micro-level instantiations of social/institutional/discursive practices has been referred to only in order to highlight differences between the perspective taken here and discourse analytical approaches to interpreting research While the latter takes actual discourse as its starting point, the concern here is to theorise the social/interactional conditions under which interpreters may claim communication rights as well as the extent and type of rights they may claim. The convergence of distinctive fields and habitus within interpreted interactions and the contingent nature of the interpreter’s role within these, may create significant discordancy within the social/interactional space which may trigger discursive gaps between local, interactional practices and the socially constituted norms that function to suppress contradictions and struggles over legitimate forms of communication. Participants’ responses to this convergence may differ depending on the context, all are socially and interactionally challenged in their conscious or unconscious struggles for social/interactional control or consensus over communication rights and meaning

The paradoxes and potentials of the interpreting habitus

London