Recruiting repair: Making sense of interpreters’ embodied actions in a video-mediated environment

Abstract

This article examines interpreters’ embodied displays of trouble in hospital encounters in Norway. In these meetings, participants speak different languages, and the interpreters, that is multilinguals with interpreter education and other formal qualifications, produce utterances in either of the languages in question. As such, the specific interaction in which these embodied displays of trouble occur is mediated in two ways, it is both interpreter-mediated and video-mediated. Video-recordings of hospital settings where the interpreting is carried out through use of video-technology are analyzed using multimodal conversation analysis. The interpreters’ embodied displays of trouble are found resemble recruitmens and are found to initiate repair. The article shows that while the embodied display of trouble might be a versatile device to initiate repair within the video-mediated environment, the video-mediated environment provides a complex interactional space for the perception of the embodied action.