Harjunpaeae2017

Harjunpaeae2017
BibType	PHDTHESIS
Key	Harjunpaeae2017
Author(s)	Katariina Harjunpää
Title	Translatory practices in everyday conversation: Bilingual mediating in Finnish–Brazilian Portuguese interaction
Editor(s)
Tag(s)	EMCA, IL, Translation, Bilingual, Finnish, Brazilian Portuguese, Interactional Linguistics
Publisher
Year	2017
Language	English
City
Month
Journal
Volume
Number
Pages
URL	Link
DOI
ISBN	978-951-51-3227-7
Organization
Institution
School	University of Helsinki
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

Download BibTex

Abstract

This thesis examines the interactive organization of bilingual mediating in everyday conversations among Finnish and Brazilian Portuguese speakers. The study focuses on how participants who know both of these languages relay parts of the ongoing conversation for their co-participants in the other language, and thereby facilitate their understanding and participation in the interaction. The bilingual speakers’ means of representing prior talk and action in another language are referred to here as translatory practices. The study seeks to understand how participants introduce and handle translatory talk as an intelligible, accountable part of the ongoing activity. More specific research questions concern what occasions mediating at given moments, how translatory talk carries the voice of the original speaker, what kinds of actions are accomplished by translating, as well as how translatory utterances are fitted to and how they shape the unfolding of the interactions. This approach to translatory interaction is based on the methods and theoretical framework of multimodal Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. After situating the study within relevant fields of research and providing background for the analyses (ch. 2), the study proceeds to investigate recurrent turn designs in translatory talk. When speakers move into translating, they can frame their turns with explicit quotative elements to mark another voice, or they can relay elements from prior talk in another language without overt framing. The various formats for translatory turns occur in different sequential and action environments, connecting in distinct ways to the prior talk as their source. The means of explicit framing (ch. 3) include reporting clauses, topic formulations, generalizations of stance, turn-initial ‘voicing particles’ and the logophoric use of third-person pronouns. In comparison, when speakers deliver translatory talk without additional framing (ch. 4), the composition of the relayed material itself and its placement in the conversation allow the turn to be understood as translating prior talk. For this, speakers make use of turn-initial lexical ‘keywords’ as detached or fronted within the larger turn, or as free-standing units. These keywords occur in various types of retellings. Quotative framings and keywords are also compared to translatory turns that are delivered without any clear marking of another voice (ch. 5 and one set of cases in ch. 6). In these turns, the speaker relies on the recipient’s access to the ongoing activity and/or recycles prior action as an independent agent. The analysis of mediating in question–answer sequences (ch. 6) brings to light how negotiations of addressivity and epistemic domains intertwine with the organization of bilingual mediating, as well as what consequences the more restricted sequential environment has on the representation of prior talk and action. The study demonstrates how translatory talk is reflexively shaped in relation to the conversational sequences and courses of action in which it occurs, and how the participants thereby handle a variety of tasks for the purpose of managing intersubjectively coherent understandings in the asymmetric, multilingual interactions. Among other things, a move into mediating involves establishing the situated relevance of the prior talk for the other language-speakers as recipients, which typically involves multimodal negotiation of their participation. In brief, the study offers a perspective on oral translation in terms of mundane conversational phenomena by showing how the participants methodically orient to local features of the interaction through their translatory practices.

Notes