Turn-taking in dialogue interpreting

This study addresses cognitive aspects of turn-taking and the role of experience in dialogue interpreting, by investigating the temporal and textual properties of the coupled turn (i.e. the original utterance and its interpretation). A comparison was made using a video-recorded scripted role-play between eight interpreters, with Swedish-French or Swedish-Spanish as working languages and with different levels of experience. Cognitively challenging long stretches of talk were introduced in both directions of the working languages and analyzed with a multi-modal approach. We identified a number of quantitative measures, such as the number of coupled turns and the time used. Furthermore, we qualitatively analyzed the types of renditions. The findings suggest that the mean length of time of the coupled turn, which we label processing span, is a measure that is not primarily related to interpreting experience but rather reflects the constraints of the interpreter’s working memory. A further finding is that the inexperienced interpreters have a higher percentage of reduced renditions than the experienced interpreters, and this difference is statistically significant.

Disability, Illness, and Pain

This chapter investigates Woolf’s contradictory attitudes towards bodies outside what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson terms ‘the normate’. Woolf evinces a profound understanding of bodies experiencing illness or mental health issues, but she often displays callous, deeply normate reactions to bodies with structural or cognitive differences. Critics have noted these contradictions, typically using a medical humanities frame for assessing her treatment of illness and mental health, and a disability studies frame for assessing her treatment of structural and cognitive impairments. These separate frames are vital, yet their separation may also elide how Woolf uses certain forms of illness and disability to make other forms less visible. Drawing on her diary, the essays ‘On Being Ill’ and ‘Street Haunting’, and Mrs Dalloway, the chapter explores how Woolf’s attitudes reveal inherent tensions surrounding definitions of illness and disability and argues that we need a composite, multi-modal approach to evaluate her treatment of non-normate bodies.