Exploring untrained interpreters’ use of direct versus indirect speech

Interpreting ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Friedel Dubslaff ◽  
Bodil Martinsen

This study examines the interrelations between the use of direct vs. indirect speech by primary participants and by dialogue interpreters by focusing on pronoun shifts and their interactional functions. The data consist of four simulated interpreter-mediated medical interviews based on the same scripted role play. The subjects were untrained Arabic interpreters working for a Danish agency. Two of the four interpreters favoured the direct style of interpreting. The other two favoured the indirect style. The findings show that all four interpreters tended to identify with the patient by personalizing the indefinite pronoun one when relaying from doctor to patient. All other pronoun shifts occurred in connection with interactional problems caused almost exclusively by the interpreters’ lack of knowledge about medical terminology — even though the terms used were in fact non-specialized ones. The study also indicates that primary parties’ shifts from direct to indirect address are closely related either to the form or to the content of the interpreter’s prior utterance. Finally, it emerges that repeated one-language talk, triggered by the interpreter’s problems with medical terminology, can override the quasi-directness of communication between primary participants, which is connected with interpreting in the first person.

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 144-165
Author(s):  
Fathi Migdadi ◽  
Muhammad A. Badarneh ◽  
Laila Khwaylih

Abstract This study examines Jordanian graduate students' complaints posted on a Facebook closed group and directed to the representatives of Student Union at Jordan University of Science and Technology to be transferred to the officials concerned. In line with Boxer (1993b), the study considers the students' complaints to be indirect speech acts, as the addressee(s) are not the source of the offense. Using a sample of 60 institutional complaining posts, the researchers have analysed the complaints in terms of their semantic formulas, politeness functions and correlations with the gender of the complainers. The students’ complaints are classified into six semantic formulas of which the act statement element is indispensable as the complaint is stated in it. The other five formulas, ordered according to their frequency, are opener, remedy, appreciative closing, justification and others. Despite the negative affect typically involved in the complaining act, the semantic formulas identified in this study are found to signal politeness and fit into Brown and Levinson’s (1987) pool of face-saving strategies rather than face-threatening acts. Specifically, when the graduate students direct their Facebook complaints to the students' representatives, they tend to offer camaraderie with them to be encouraged to pursue the problems specified in the complainers’ posts.


Philosophies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
S. J. Blodgett-Ford

The phenomenon and ethics of “voting” will be explored in the context of human enhancements. “Voting” will be examined for enhanced humans with moderate and extreme enhancements. Existing patterns of discrimination in voting around the globe could continue substantially “as is” for those with moderate enhancements. For extreme enhancements, voting rights could be challenged if the very humanity of the enhanced was in doubt. Humans who were not enhanced could also be disenfranchised if certain enhancements become prevalent. Voting will be examined using a theory of engagement articulated by Professor Sophie Loidolt that emphasizes the importance of legitimization and justification by “facing the appeal of the other” to determine what is “right” from a phenomenological first-person perspective. Seeking inspiration from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of 1948, voting rights and responsibilities will be re-framed from a foundational working hypothesis that all enhanced and non-enhanced humans should have a right to vote directly. Representative voting will be considered as an admittedly imperfect alternative or additional option. The framework in which voting occurs, as well as the processes, temporal cadence, and role of voting, requires the participation from as diverse a group of humans as possible. Voting rights delivered by fiat to enhanced or non-enhanced humans who were excluded from participation in the design and ratification of the governance structure is not legitimate. Applying and extending Loidolt’s framework, we must recognize the urgency that demands the impossible, with openness to that universality in progress (or universality to come) that keeps being constituted from the outside.


2004 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-276
Author(s):  
Barry Kemp

The first millennium bc brought warfare to the interior of Egypt on a significant scale. We have two vivid records, one written and the other pictorial. The former is a first-person narrative of the Napatan (Sudanese) king Piankhy who, having gained control of the south of Egypt, embarked in 730 bc on a methodical subjugation of the rest of the country, then under the rule of several local families. During the seemingly irresistible northward progress of his army Piankhy makes frequent reference to walls with battlements and gates which could be countered with siege towers/battering rams and the erection of earthen ramps, although Piankhy himself preferred the tactic of direct storming. Within the circuit of these walls lay treasuries and granaries and, in the case of the city of Hermopolis in Middle Egypt, the palace of the local king Nemlut together with its stables for horses.


2014 ◽  
Vol 555 ◽  
pp. 652-658 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbu Cristian Braun ◽  
Ileana Constanta Rosca

The paper describes a new method of body equilibrium evaluation applied for different human subjects, the principal aim being to demonstrate to what extent any locomotory diseases could influence the body stability and equilibrium. The research refers to identify some persons with different locomotory diseases and to find both the influence on equilibrium and stability and if possible to improve them. Our research stage, synthesized in this paper, explains the body equilibrium evaluation in orthostatic posture done for different subjects, aged between 20 and 40 years. A number of 10 relevant persons were considered to be evaluated, 2 of them having some locomotory diseases. The first person presents any neuro-motor stability problems in case of long standing case. The other person has both Achilles tendons torn and operated. All subjects were tested in orthostatic posture, in 3 distinct positions, using a Kistler force plate. The experiments referred to the body mass center (COM) displacement in sagittal and lateral planes, representing an interesting characteristic for its equilibrium. It was shown that the person with diseases affecting stability presented a loss of equilibrium when standing for 10-20 seconds, i.e. higher COM displacements in both planes reported to the other tested subjects.


Author(s):  
Daiga Zirnīte

The aim of the study is to define how and to what effect the first-person narrative form is used in Oswald Zebris’s novel “Māra” (2019) and how the other elements of the narrative support it. The analysis of the novel employs both semiotic and narratological ideas, paying in-depth attention to those elements of the novel’s structure that can help the reader understand the growth path and power of the heroine Māra, a 16-year-old young woman entangled in external and internal conflict. As the novel is predominantly written from the title character’s point of view, as she is the first-person narrator in 12 of the 16 chapters of the novel, the article reveals the principle of chapter arrangement, the meaning of the second first-person narrator (in four novel chapters) and the main points of the dramatic structure of the story. Although in interviews after the publication of the novel, the author Zebris has emphasised that he has written the novel about a brave girl who at her 16 years is ready to make the decisions necessary for her personal growth, her open, candid, and emotionally narrated narrative creates inner resistance in readers, especially the heroine’s peers, and therefore makes it difficult to observe and appreciate her courage and the positive metamorphosis in the dense narrative of the heroine’s feelings, impressions, memories, imaginary scenes, various impulses and comments on the action. It can be explained by the form of narration that requires the reader to identify with the narrator; however, it is cumbersome if the narrator’s motives, details, and emotions, expressed openly and honestly, are unacceptable, incomprehensible, or somehow exaggerated.


2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (84) ◽  
pp. 93-104
Author(s):  
Troels Obbekær
Keyword(s):  

This article investigates the ambivalence embedded in the literary motif of the precarious autobiographical narrator’s distanced and solidary gaze on the precarious ‘others’ and their bodies. In analyzing Tragedie plus tid gange ni (2017) and Yarden (2009), the article argues that through ‘precarious narration’ – an unreliable first-person narrator’s inability to understand the other characters and their distress – the novels lead to an understanding of the cultural divisions and work-related experiences of the precariat.


2020 ◽  
pp. 119-133
Author(s):  
Beata Kuryłowicz ◽  

This article is an attempt to perform a semantic analysis of anatomical vocabulary collected by Michał Abraham Troc in Nowy dykcjonarz, published in Lipsk in 1764. The aim of individual analyses based on the lexical field theory is to demonstrate the meaning of lexemes, to determine their place within a field, as well as to disclose semantic relationships: synonymy, polysemy and hyponymy. The semantic analysis presented in this article clearly demonstrates abundance and differentiation of 18th century anatomical vocabulary, as well as prevalence of native over borrowed words. Among 250 names, only eleven units are borrowings from foreign languages: seven Latin and four German ones. This provides evidence there is a fundamental role of native lexis, especially colloquial vocabulary, in the formation of Polish anatomical terminology, and, more extensively, also medical terminology, in the first phase of its development which continued until the end of the 18th century. Of note is also the non-uniform arrangement of lexemes in individual fields and asymmetry in their number. Selected lexical fields are characterised by non-uniform size, different level of semantic stratification and differentiated degree of generality of words they contain. On the other hand, semantic relations observed in the analysed anatomical vocabulary, especially synonymy and polysemy, confirm there is a differentiation of anatomical lexis, on the other hand, they indicate lack of precision in expressing content by the discussed lexical units.


2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordan Zlatev

Abstract Mimetic schemas, unlike the popular cognitive linguistic notion of image schemas, have been characterized in earlier work as explicitly representational, bodily structures arising from imitation of culture-specific practical actions (Zlatev 2005, 2007a, 2007b). We performed an analysis of the gestures of three Swedish and three Thai children at the age of 18, 22 and 26 months in episodes of natural interaction with caregivers and siblings in order to analyze the hypothesis that iconic gestures emerge as mimetic schemas. In accordance with this hypothesis, we predicted that the children's first iconic gestures would be (a) intermediately specific, (b) culture-typical, (c) falling in a set of recurrent types, (d) predominantly enacted from a first-person perspective (1pp) rather than performed from a third-person perspective (3pp), with (e) 3pp gestures being more dependent on direct imitation than 1pp gestures and (f) more often co-occurring with speech. All specific predictions but the last were confirmed, and differences were found between the children's iconic gestures on the one side and their deictic and emblematic gestures on the other. Thus, the study both confirms earlier conjectures that mimetic schemas “ground” both gesture and speech and implies the need to qualify these proposals, limiting the link between mimetic schemas and gestures to the iconic category.


Author(s):  
Erica McAlpine

This chapter focuses on a word used wrongly by a poet who often took pride in his own wrongness. Unlike Browning and Wordsworth, John Clare paid little attention to details like spelling and punctuation: he depended on editors for clean copy. So what should readers make of his writing “wander” with an “o” in one poem and an “a” in another? Or of his invoking both meanings—wondering and wandering—in a single poem, but spelling them the same? Resisting the urge to gloss over this mistake, either by shrugging it off as a careless misspelling or by treating the words as yoked, the chapter disentangles the idea of mistake from carelessness on the one hand and lack of knowledge or education on the other. It calls for the possibility of blundering even amid competing editorial concerns over what constitutes a draft and when to edit for consistency, suggesting that readers have much to gain by distinguishing Clare's feigned errors from his unwilling mistakes.


Metaphysica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-149
Author(s):  
Nils-Frederic Wagner ◽  
Iva Apostolova

AbstractStandard views of personal identity over time often hover uneasily between the subjective, first-person dimension (e. g. psychological continuity), and the objective, third-person dimension (e. g. biological continuity) of a person’s life. Since both dimensions capture something integral to personal identity, we show that neither can successfully be discarded in favor of the other. The apparent need to reconcile subjectivity and objectivity, however, presents standard views with problems both in seeking an ontological footing of, as well as epistemic evidence for, personal identity. We contend that a fresh look at neutral monism offers a novel way to tackle these problems; counting on the most fundamental building blocks of reality to be ontologically neutral with regards to subjectivity and objectivity of personal identity. If the basic units of reality are, in fact, ontologically neutral – but can give rise to mental as well as physical events – these basic units of reality might account for both subjectivity and objectivity in personal identity. If this were true, it would turn out that subjectivity and objectivity are not conflictive dimensions of personal identity but rather two sides of the same coin.


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