Abstract:

In an interpreted mediated activity, where parties to the interaction do not share a language on common ground and come from different cultural backgrounds, the interpreter’s task is not to be reduced to merely rendering the original utterances produced by one of the primary participants. The role of the translator, who is engaged in intralingual and intersemiotic translation, should be addressed not in a static framework but in the dynamism of that communication environment. Considering that the verbal component is generally prioritized over the nonverbal cues, studies into the dynamics of mediated talk should focus on the contribution of the nonverbal elements to the course of interaction as it unfolds. This study seeks to examine, within the framework of the multimodal approach, how the interpreter’s responses to the nonverbal behavior of the other interlocutors contribute to the communication environment. In this respect, Ekman and Friesen’s (1969; 1981) classification of the interplay between verbal and nonverbal elements will help examine the interpreter’s role in the context of intersemiotic translation. The corpus of the study consists of the transcriptions of two different audio-videotaped mediated settings in dental and hair aesthetics. It has been shown that the interpreter’s intersemiotic mediation has an important function in establishing the enunciative existence of the parties to the interaction.

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