Project
Community interpreting in face-to-face interactions has become an increasingly common and important phenomenon in many parts of the world as globalization and migration have led to increased linguistic diversity. Such community interpreting comes in many forms: children may translate for their parents in encounters with teachers, doctors, or others, bilingual workers may fill in as ad hoc interpreters in their workplaces (e.g. nurses or police officers), or it may involve professional, trained interpreters, especially in institutional settings such as courts or governmental institutions. The analysis of such encounters can shed light on how individuals with limited proficiency in a society's official language experience this language and its speakers, how they negotiate and adapt their language skills in a new environment, and how interpreters – bilinguals – mediate in this process. Furthermore, interpreting is also a fruitful site for language contact studies, as speakers of minority languages often display some competence in the dominant language and engage in codeswitching, while interpreters often produce utterances in one language that are influenced by the structure of the other language, in ways that may be parallel to community-wide grammatical changes in the contact languages.
Despite this considerable research potential, the study of community interpreting remains a relatively underresearched topic in linguistics. With the Community Interpreting Database (ComInDat), we seek to advance the study of interpreter-mediated interaction from different analytical perspectives. Research in other areas of linguistics, such as the study of child language or of language disorders, has benefitted tremendously from the creation of data exchange systems, by fostering exchange and cooperation between scholars, by furthering the creation of common methods of analysis, and most importantly, by making data openly verifiable and conclusions based on them testable. With ComInDat, we hope to stimulate similar developments in the study of community interpreting. Specifically, ComInDat aims to
- create an international corpus of interpreting data from a variety of settings and with a large number of language dyads
- develop common standards for annotating multilingual data from interpreter-mediated interaction
- integrate different conventions and digital formats for transcribing and annotating data into a common framework
- facilitate the sharing of recorded audio or video data and associated digital transcripts
- further establish the significance of combining text, sound, and image for the investigation of interpreter-mediated interaction and promote the use of digital annotation and transcription technology
By making data available from a variety of settings and with a number of different languages, the database will greatly facilitate comparative investigations, both between interpreter-mediated interactions in different settings or with different languages, as well as between interpreter-mediated interaction and other forms of multilingual interaction. Also, community interpreting often involves language dyads that have been extensively studied in language contact research, such as Spanish/English in the US, or Turkish/German in Germany. This will allow other researchers working on contact between these languages to draw on the corpus and compare its findings to their own.
