ABSTRACT. According to the UNHCR, more than a million Syrian war refugees have come to Europe since 2011; with around 770,000 living in Germany (as at January 2019). As a result, the importance of interpretation, including by non-professional translators and interpreters, has risen sharply in that country. This also brings with it some problems. In light of this wider challenge, this work takes a focused view by offering a qualitative examination of the conditions and problems of translation and interpreting in the context of the asylum procedures of Syrian refugees in Halle. It does so on the basis of interviews with refugees and interpreters in order to identify options for solving the existing problems. The researcher conducted interviews with Syrian refugees in the city of Halle, whose ages ranged from 25 to 50 years. They all speak Arabic as their mother tongue and they had some problems because of the interpretation services. The researcher chose the city of Halle to conduct the research for several reasons, including that there is no previous research on this subject in this city and because of the large number of Syrian refugees in this city and its proximity to Leipzig, where the researcher studies at the University of Leipzig. In examining these reported experiences in detail, this research is intended to answer the following essential questions: What problems has this group experienced because of allegedly or quantifiably poor interpreting? What are the reasons for mistakes being made when interpreting in the asylum procedure? How do the refugees themselves see the role of interpreters? Which body qualifies a person to work as an interpreter in asylum procedures, and why or in what ways might they unsuitable for this task? The study is thereby intended to contribute to gaining a better understanding of the phenomenon and wants to offer starting points for further investigation.

ABSTRACT. With the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine triggering a sudden wave of displaced people in Europe, an increased need for interpreters in Russian and Ukrainian has emerged (Štefková, Šveda 2022; NIBR 2022). This study explores public service interpretation (PSI) provided at the refugees’ hub of Bologna, Italy in 2022. Given the emotional burden and the potential distress of interpreting in crisis contexts (Tiselius, Hägglund, Pernilla 2020), this study aims at determining to what extent interpreters’ wellbeing has been considered, and at exploring the role of the Department of Interpreting and Translation (DIT), University of Bologna in assisting ASP, the service provider (SP). In-depth interviews have been conducted with 4 lay interpreters, one employee of ASP, and 2 SIPEM (Italian Emergency Psychology Society) psychologists who offered debriefing sessions, while 11 DIT students have taken part to 3 focus group discussions. The questions concerned interpreters’ background and experience; how they provided interpretation and/or linguistic mediation; their feelings during and after interpreting; SP’s organisation of PSI; psychological debriefing sessions. The content of the interviews has been transcribed, and data have been processed by content analysis. The results of this study suggest that this experience can serve as a good practice example: it has demonstrated a good level of mutual support between public institutions, and a particular attention to interpreters’ health and wellbeing. It has also shown that it is crucial to raise awareness on vicarious trauma and coping strategies, especially among lay interpreters, and it is of utmost importance to include training modules on interpreting in crisis settings in the curricula of interpreting schools.

NIBR Report 2022. Ukrainian refugees – experiences from the first phase in Norway. https://udi.no/globalassets/statistikk-og-analyse/ukrainian-refugees-experiences-from-the-first-phase-in-norway-nibr.pdf. Accessed on: 12 November 2022.

Štefková, M. and Šveda, P. 2022. “War in Ukraine and public service interpreting in Slovakia: Initial impressions and implications”. Bridge. Vol. 3 No. 1. pp 42-57.

Tiselius, E., Hägglund, E., Pernilla, P. ‘Distressful Situations, Non-Supportive Work Climate, Threats to Professional and Private Integrity: Healthcare Interpreting in Sweden’. In Advances in Medical Diagnosis, Treatment, and Care, edited by Izabel E.T. de V. Souza and Effrossyni (Effie) Fragkou, 54–79. IGI Global, 2020.

ABSTRACT. Although source language interference (SLI) is an omnipresent phenomenon in interpreting, there is a lack of research on the cognitive processes behind it. In my study I aim to test my cognitive linguistic / psycholinguistic account of lexical SLI that is based on the Gravitational pull hypothesis (Halverson 2003). I suggest that the locus of SLI is the semantic network – the entrenched connections between word forms and their senses: having to render a less entrenched sense of a polysemous noun into the target language might enhance the probability of SLI. To test this hypothesis I intend to conduct a study using the EPIC UdS simultaneous interpreting corpus (Przybyl et al., 2022) in which I will compare English-German interpreters’ performance while rendering nouns that have difference entrenchment patterns. Determining the entrenchment patterns of nouns for the corpus study requires considerable preparatory work. I will present my methodological approach, which has been developed with the aim to access this directly unobservable cognitive phenomenon – entrenchment – by combining three different methods to ensure that the resulting description of the crosslinguistic entrenchment patterns is as psychologically realistic as possible. In this approach, entrenchment is operationalized as frequency (following Halverson 2017) and the crosslinguistic relationships for a sample of polysemous verbs are established using an English language corpus, and a word association task and a translation task, both conducted with German native speakers with high proficiency in English. I will present the challenges and the preliminary results of the preparatory methodological study.

References: Halverson, S.L. (2003). The cognitive basis of translation universals. Target-international Journal of Translation Studies, 15, 197-241. Halverson, S. (2017). Gravitational pull in translation. Testing a revised model. In G. De Sutter, M.-A. Lefer, & I. Delaere (Eds.), Empirical Translation Studies (pp. 9–46). De Gruyter Mouton. Przybyl, H., Lapshinova-Koltunski, E., Menzel, K., Fischer, S., & Teich, E. (2022). EPIC UdS - Creation and Applications of a Simultaneous Interpreting Corpus. Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 1193–1200.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates empirically whether and according to which criteria the outcome of simultaneous interpretation can be considered successful. The analysis is based on a speech that was originally delivered in English and simultaneously interpreted into Italian during a plenary session at the European Parliament. The recording and the transcription of both the original speech and its interpretation are taken from the European Parliament Translation and Interpreting Corpus (Bernardini et al., 2016). Methodologically, the analysis is based on a survey that evaluates and compares comprehension levels across listeners of the original speech and listeners of the interpreted speech.

A total of twenty respondents participated in the survey, of which ten were English native speakers and ten were Italian native speakers. The participants listened to either the original speech or its interpretation according to their native language and answered five questions about the speeches. The first four questions focused in detail on the content of the speeches and aimed to assess whether the interpreter had successfully translated everything that had been said by the original speaker. The questions also investigated whether the interpreting strategies (Riccardi 2005) employed by the interpreter to produce the interpretation had an impact on the listener’s comprehension. The last question focused on the impressions that the listeners received after listening to either the original speech or its interpretation; it had the purpose to assess whether the two different discourses had different impacts on their respective target audiences. The results obtained from the questionnaire were compared with one another and analyzed statistically using Fisher’s exact test. The test was used to determine whether the answers given by the respondents of the two groups were linked to the language in which they listened to the speech, and therefore to the fact that they listened to the original speech or its interpretation.

References:

Bernardini, Ferraresi, A., & Milicevic, M. (2016). From EPIC to EPTIC - Exploring simplification in interpreting and translation from an intermodal perspective. Target 28(1), 61–86. https://doi.org/10.1075/target.28.1.03ber

Riccardi, Alessandra (2005). On the Evolution of Interpreting Strategies in Simultaneous Interpreting. In: Meta, vol. 502 , pp. 753-767. https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/meta/2005-v50-n2-meta881/011016ar/

ABSTRACT. Children's semiotic development is marked by the acquisition of sign function - the ability to understand that a particular expression represents a certain object (e.g. Zlatev & McCune 2014). We observe the expansion of this skill in the second year of life: into polysemiotic communication, which consists of fluent combinations of signs from different systems, for example speech and gestures (Louhema et al. 2019). Attention to pointing gestures emerges in children around the 5th month of their life, and continues to develop until they exercise it at around 10th month of age (Camaioni et al. 2004). It is the first prelinguistic communicative sign humans perform, and one of key tools of joint attention (Carpenter et al. 1998). Importantly, pointing is a ‘simple’ gesture - iconic gestures, for comparison, require the ability to recognise and map an object’s features into a gestural form. This kind of gesture use and identification requires communicative practice and refined motor skills. In my talk, I present the results of a gesture-labelling experiment with 2-, 2.5- and 3-year olds (n=30). I describe the behaviours they present when they see a pointing gesture that is a part of another gesture - a representing one, used in the game. The observations I make lead to a surprising conclusion on how strong pointing gesture is in children at a particular age. Children start to understand iconic gestures when they are around 2, but it seems that pointing prevails.

Camaioni, L., Perucchini, P., Bellagamba, F., & Colonnesi, C. (2004). The role of declarative pointing in developing a theory of mind. Infancy, 5(3), 291-308.

Carpenter, M., Nagell, K., Tomasello, M., Butterworth, G., & Moore, C. (1998). Social cognition, joint attention, and communicative competence from 9 to 15 months of age. Monographs of the society for research in child development, i-174.

Louhema, K., Zlatev, J., Graziano, M., & van de Weijer, J. (2019). Translating from monosemiotic to polysemiotic narratives: A study of Finnish speech and gestures. Sign Systems Studies, 47(3/4), 480-525.

Zlatev, J., & McCune, L. (2014). Toward and integrated model of semiotic development. Cognitive development: Theories, stages, processes and challenges, 59-76.

ABSTRACT. The pressure of decision making is one of life’s constants, regardless of the circumstances. This research is focused on how it affects the usage of adaptor gestures. In the Role Playing Games (RPGs) conversations happen on two dimensions: the world of the imagination, where the situation is often formal; and the realistic, informal social encounter. Thanks to this dichotomy, it is an interesting, adaptor-rich area that has not yet been explored. By choosing this unique field of study it is possible to examine the issue of social pressure in a safe, controlled environment. The paper is concerned with several parts of an RPG session played in Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition system with three participants. Each of them acts both as an imaginary character, created for the long-running game, and as themself, a polish speaking student in their twenties. A total of 50 minutes of video recordings was analysed for the presence of adaptors and their three basic types (Ekman & Friesen, 1969) in relation to their level of personal relevance. Variables which were taken into consideration are: (1) height at which the adaptor occurred, (2) its duration, (3) form of the adaptor and (4) context of appearance. For the latter the important factor was whether it appeared during situations where the person was actively performing as their player character or not. Quantitative analysis is performed on the data to check how significant the variables are, and to check how they may apply for further Role-Playing Games studies. Most of the decisions were made in the imaginary world, in more or less formal situations. The adaptors in this context were rather longer and showed a tendency towards more closed forms. The height did not prove to be strongly correlated to any other variable.

Ekman, P. and Friesen, W. V. (1969). The Repertoire of Nonverbal Behavior: Categories, Origins, Usage, and Coding. semiotica, 1(1), pp. 49-98.

ABSTRACT. This is a comparative study aimed to present, compare and describe the differences and characteristics of the recurrent ring gestures between Arabic language adult speakers from Jordan and English language adult speakers from America. I focused on collecting similar video materials for this study in certain aspects. They are from YouTube, all speakers are adults. The interactions were face-to-face, the utterances were spontaneous, people were persuasive and this is a polilog. Discussions in both videos were political as well as sociological debates. ELAN software has been used for the analysis of the video materials. It was used for splitting the recurrent ring gestures to write annotations, formal characteristics, and notes for each recurrent ring gesture separately. Microsoft Excel was used in this thesis to collect numerical data for each topic and to make the comparative analysis through graphs. This thesis reveals that Jordanian speakers use either the right or left hand only, while American speakers use both hands, but they mostly use the right hand for the ring gesture. The Jordanian speakers don't use their palms to the left and up, and they direct their palms down less. The Americans direct their palms in all directions with the ring gesture. The ring shape for the ring gesture of Jordanian speakers was mostly circular. Whereas it was oval and circular approximately at the same level for the American speakers. The space of gesture production in relation to the Jordanian speaker's body was within the body a little more than outside the body for the ring gestures. While for the American speakers, there was a very high percentage within the body and very small numbers outside the body. The Jordanian speakers use the ring gesture in relation to their body level mostly at the upper chest and lower part of the head, while the Americans use the ring gesture in relation to their body level at the upper chest level mostly.

ABSTRACT. Pantomime has recently gained much attention thanks to its non-symbolic nature, revealing the body’s potential to create meaning without pre-established conventions. There are many studies investigating different aspects of pantomime (van Nispen et al., 2017; Beattie & Shovelton, 2002; Motamedi et al., 2019), but they make limited use of its expressive potential. First, they usually focus on simple concepts, second, they rarely support the intersubjective nature of communication. In this study, we compare pantomime with spoken language, which, unlike pantomime, is said to be convention-based and systematic. We ask whether and when can pantomime be a more effective or successful (i.e., faster) communication tool than spoken language. We investigate communicative effectiveness through an interactive game of charades. Sixteen Czech-speaking dyads were instructed to verbally and pantomimically “describe” various events (represented by deverbative nouns) to each other. These concepts leave a considerable room for individual interpretation and at the same time involve the construction of a specific micro-situation. In the analysis, we compare the success time for each concept and explore the effects of its formal and semantic parameters such as the most frequent frame elements, iconicity, motion aspect, animacy, etc. While verbal strategy is more successful on average (10.82 s vs. 15.72 s in pantomime), pantomime also proves to be a efficacious strategy, fostering ad hoc conventionality and quasi-systematic elements in an interactive setting. This contribution therefore invites to discuss the aspects commonly attributed to speech versus pantomime, interactivity and the paradigm of “language game” (Christiansen & Chater, 2022). Beattie, G., & Shovelton, H. (2002). An experimental investigation of some properties of individual iconic gestures that mediate their communicative power. British Journal Of Psychology, 93(2), 179–192. Christiansen, M. H., & Chater, N. (2022). The language game: How improvisation created language and changed the world. Hachette UK. Motamedi, Y., Schouwstra, M., Smith, K., Culbertson, J., & Kirby, S. (2019). Evolving artificial sign languages in the lab: From improvised gesture to systematic sign. Cognition, 192, 103964. van Nispen, K., Mieke, W., van de Sandt-Koenderman, E., & Krahmer, E. (2017). Production and Comprehension of Pantomimes Used to Depict Objects [Online]. Frontiers In Psychology.

ABSTRACT. Female occupational terms (feminativa) invariably seem to be one of the most frequently discussed linguistic topics in the mainstream media. At first glance, one may conclude that there is a notable division among language users: into “supporters” of feminativa and “opponents” of this linguistic practice. But is such a dividing line really the case? The purpose of this paper was to investigate the level of acceptance of female occupational terms among students and employees at Adam Mickiewicz University. The names were selected from the alphabetical index of occupations and specialties published by the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy (2014). In the study, 113 names were used. The task was to determine the level of acceptance for particular feminativa on a 0 to 5 scale. The tool was uploaded to the Qualtrics platform, and a link to fill it out was sent out to the various units at AMU. The research group amounted to 369 people. The results obtained were subjected to statistical analysis using the Jamovi software. The groups compared were: 1) men and women, 2) employees and students. This is a preliminary study. The next stage of the study is to examine what factors (linguistic and sociopsychological) are related to the level of acceptance.

Bibliography: Indeks Alfabetyczny Zawodów i Specjalności. 2014. Karwatowska, Małgorzata and Jolanta Szpyra. 2010. Lingwistyka płci. Ona i on w języku polskim. Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej. Krysiak, Patrycja. 2016. “Feminatywa w polskiej tradycji leksykograficznej”, Wrocławskie Towarzystwo Naukowe. Rozprawy Komisji Językowej 42: 83-90. Łaziński M. 2006. O panach i paniach. Polskie rzeczowniki tytularne i ich asymetria rodzajowo-płciowa. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN. Małocha-Krupa, Agnieszka (ed.). 2015. Słownik nazw żeńskich polszczyzny. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego. Małocha-Krupa, Agnieszka. 2018. Feminatywum w uwikłaniach językowo – kulturowych. Wrocław: Oficyna Wydawnicza ATUT - Wrocławskie Wydawnictwo Oświatowe. Mills, Sara. 2008. Language and Sexism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Stanowisko Rady Języka Polskiego przy Prezydium PAN w sprawie żeńskich form nazw zawodów i tytułów, 2019. Szpyra-Kozłowska, Jolanta. 2021. Nianiek, ministra i japonki. Eseje o języku i płci. Kraków: Universitas. Woźniak, Ewa. 2014. “Język a emancypacja, feminizm, gender”, Rozprawy Komisji Językowej ŁTN 60: 295-312.

ABSTRACT. Although leadership positions have traditionally been held by men, nowadays, women are also increasingly taking up such professions. Therefore, vocabulary referring to female leaders is also increasingly used. Estonian language planning has recommended that the word esinaine (‘chairwoman’) should be used when referring to a female person who leads a group consisting only of women. According to this, the chairwoman can not lead an organization where women and men are mixed, even if women are in the majority. (Mäearu 2008) This paper analyzes to what extent the usage recommendation described above applies in modern Estonian language and how has the usage of esinaine (’chairwoman’) changed over the century. As a data, corpus material from different eras was used (1920–1940, 1950–1979, 1990–2008, 2013 and 2021) to find out in which meaning – whether the leader of a women's organization or a mixed-gender organization – the word finds more use over time. The results confirmed that in modern Estonian, esinaine appears in the meaning of ‘leader of a mixed-gender organization’ more frequently. The described usage recommendation has been appropriate in texts representing the years 1920–1949, but no longer in today's language usage. The recommendation sheds light on bigger questions regarding Estonian, which is a genderless language – how should language users refer to an agent of female (or other) gender when a large proportion of occupational titles contain generic masculine? What kind of difficulties and discussions has the issue of gendered occupational titles brought along? Thus, the paper also highlights gender expression and its criticism (see Kuusik 2015, Pakosta 2021; Kaukonen 2022a; Kaukonen 2022b), which is, in a way, crisis in itself, both in the Estonian language and elsewhere.

ABSTRACT. The #MeToo movement in 2017, followed by #MeTooInceste in 2021 in France, spurred a wave of testimonies on sexual violence. The number of victims of sexual abuse seems to keep rising, but only because the threshold of tolerance decreases (Bajos et al., 2008). In other words, more victims dare to speak up because society seems more open to listening (Foubert et al., 2022). However, sexual violence, such as incest, which can be defined as an unconsented sexual relationship between an older family member and a younger one, remains a strong taboo (Justice & Justice, 1980; Dussy, 2021).

This paper aims to explore incest as a taboo from a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic perspective by looking at how it is discussed in printed media in France and the United Kingdom from 2017 to 2022, i.e., from #MeToo outburst up to the present. The research question this presentation seeks to address is whether two different cultures develop the same taboo via language. Hence, I will analyse the case of American actor and director Woody Allen, whose adoptive stepdaughter accused him of molesting her. This case study is an interesting point of comparison as it is both foreign and well-known in both countries. Its analysis can reveal the differences and similarities in media coverage in the context post-MeToo.

Therefore, I first offer an overview of incest as a taboo mentioning the main anthropologists who defined it (Lévi-Strauss, 1949; Dussy, 2021). This is followed by an introduction of corpus-assisted discourse analysis that serves to clarify both the qualitative and quantitative approaches used (Baker, 2006; Baker et al., 2008; Partington, 2013). Subsequently, I will present the results of my research. For instance, the French media seems to use the term ‘incest’ more than the British ones to comment on this specific story. The focus is on social actors (Van Leeuwen, 2013) and their voices (Piazza, 2009). Linguistic features such as orthophemisms and euphemisms (Allan & Burridge, 2007) are also used to investigate whether the incest taboo is broken or strengthened in the media.

ABSTRACT. From the linguistic studies, we know that coming out is often conceptualised as a JOURNEY (e.g., Chirrey 2020), and people who talk about their experiences as transgender individuals frame the discission in terms of being torn between two identities, which is expressed gesturally (Lederer 2019). It has been also noticed that some gestures are context-sensitive and speaker-independent, giving rise to metaphorical scenarios of coming out as a gestural level (Dyrmo 2022a). Yet, not much attention has been paid to outing, particularly from a linguistic perspective (but see Dyrmo 2022b and Chirrey 2003). Outing is generally understood as ‘publicizing the fact that a specific person is gay or lesbian when that person has actively tried to stay in the closet’ (Corrigan and Matthews 2003: 244). For this study, the concept of outing has been analysed, as expressed via gesture and speech simultaneously. The analysis of 63 metaphorical gestures accompanying outing stories has revealed that various metaphors underpin the understanding of this concept, e.g., OUTING IS SHOWING AN OBJECT, SECRETS ARE HIDDEN OBJECTS, NEGATION IS A BARRIER, REVEALING A SECRET IS THROWING AN OBJECT. The present study contributes to the discussion on how abstract concepts manifest both in language and in gesture, taking into account the experiences of the often-neglected non-normative populations.

Chirrey, D. A. (2003). „I hereby come out”: What sort of speech act is coming out? Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(1), 24–37. Chirrey, D. A. (2020). Metaphors we come out by: How structural metaphors construct coming out in internet advice texts. Gender and Language, 14(1), 8–27. Corrigan, P., & Matthews, A. (2003). Stigma and disclosure: Implications for coming out of the closet. Journal of Mental Health, 12(3), 235–248. Dyrmo, T. (2022a). Gestural metaphorical scenarios and coming out narratives. Metaphor and the Social World, 12(1), 23–45. Dyrmo, T. (2022b). Multilevel cognitive model of coming out. Prace Jezykoznawcze, 24(4), 27-43. Lederer, J. (2019). Gesturing the source domain: The role of co-speech gesture in the metaphorical models of gender transition. Metaphor and the Social World, 9(1), 32–58.