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ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA: A PARADIGM SHIFT FOR TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETING?
M. Albl-Mikasa
ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences Theaterstrasse 15c — 8401 Winterthur, Switzerland Submitted on April 30, 2021 doi: 10.5922/2225-5346-2022-1-4
The global spread of English as a lingua franca (ELF) has caused a fundamental change to translation and interpreting (T&I). Translation and interpreting used to revolve around bilingual mediation between native speakers and native listeners. In interpreting, in particular, more often than not, source speeches are now produced by non-native English speakers. The impact of this development has the potential to uproot our traditional understanding of T&I. This article sets out to describe how ELF or, more specifically, input produced by non-native English speakers under ELF conditions, differs from the native-speaker input, translators and interpreters used to be dealing with. It gauges the consequences of these differences for translation and interpreting and examines how fundamental a change it is navigating between non-native speakers and listeners, as compared to the traditional situation of mediating between speakers and listeners operating in their respective first languages. This culminates in an exploration of the question as to whether there is reason to speak of a paradigm shift in translation and interpreting studies.
Keywords: English as a lingua franca (ELF), translation, interpreting, paradigm shift, non-native English speaker, agency
1. Introduction
Paradigmatic shifts occur when accepted (often mainstream) theoretical frameworks can no longer account for observable phenomena. Notably, these include the shifts from the text-oriented paradigm to process orientation in cognitive translation studies (Halverson 2020: 65), from statistical machine translation (SMT) to the neural machine translation (NMT) paradigm (Moorkens et al. 2018), from instructivist learning to knowledge construction as part of the paradigm of communicative language teaching (Sa-vignon 1983), and so on. The widening of perspectives is an integral part of academic work and scientific progress. This also involves a realization that core concepts, such as those of equivalence and loyalty, may no longer be taken at face value. In translation studies, cultural adaptations as part of Vermeer's skopos theory, Venuti's processes of domestication and for-eignization and recent discussions of transcreation almost obliterate traditional norms. In interpreting studies, the classic, neutral conduit model, which Gile describes as "a useful ideal, still widely accepted within the profession as the default standard" (2017: 241), has been challenged by the foregrounding of the notion of agency.
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Paradigm shifts occur within a discipline when the research focus shifts to different areas of interest to account for new developments. In the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language (ELTL), attention had to be redirected to the fact that English learners no longer exclusively target conversation with British or American native speakers, for instance, but more often seek to pursue international communication with other non-native users of English in varied communicative settings or geographical locations. Globalization and the concurrent global spread of English as a lingua franca brought about a shift from the traditional EFL (read 'E-F-L') or English as a foreign language to the ELF (read 'elf' in one word) or English as a lingua franca paradigm. The following table summarizes the differences in perspective based on Jenkins et al. (2011: 284).
Table 1. EFL versus ELF paradigm
EFL modern languages paradigm ELF global Englishes paradigm
Standard English as norm and benchmark English varieties and ELF described independently of the native-speaker standard
EFL: deficient ELF: different
Deviations from standard indicative of incompetency Deviations from standard regarded as manifestations of language contact and emerging ELF-specific features
Theories: interferences and fossilization Theories: language contact and language development
Code-switching sign of knowledge gaps Code-switching as a pragmatic bilingual resource
EFL speakers are learners ELF speakers are skilled language users
Aim: correctness Aim: successful communication
Emphasis on form -> errors Emphasis on function: solidarity, accommodation, communicative-strategic approach
In interpreting studies, the rise of (dialogical) community interpreting due to increased migration in the second half of the 20th century placed emphasis on tripartite participation in interpreter-mediated encounters and on the more active interactional and intercultural mediation aspects of the communication, rather than on the cognitive processes involved or interpreters' individual skills and strategies. Consequently, the discourse in interaction (DI) paradigm for community interpreting was set apart from the cognitive processes (CP) paradigm for conference interpreting (Pochhacker 2015: 69). The main differences have been described as follows (Albl-Mikasa 2020: 93):
Table 2. CP versus DI paradigm
DI paradigm CP paradigm
Communicative interaction Mental processing
Conversation management Capacity management
Role behaviour Strategic behaviour
Similarly, in both translation and interpreting (T&I), a new reality has been emerging for professionals. In addition to the introduction of a stronger technological component (including machine translation), a rather fundamental change has been taking hold. T&I used to revolve around bilingual mediation between native speakers and native language listeners with translators and interpreters working from their A, B, or C into their A or B languages. This situation has radically changed. English being the number-one working language in conference interpreting, a majority of speakers are now non-native English speakers and interpreting is more often than not from non-native English input and/or for a non-native English audience. Translation, in turn, increasingly involves the challenge of source texts in which source cultures are difficult to pin down. They may be hybrid texts (Taviano 2013: 160) produced by multiple authors with different L1s, which makes for unpredictable norms. Input in both T&I has thus become harder to gauge against common native norms due to varying English proficiency levels, L1 pragmalinguistic transfer, discrepancies between the culture associated with the English language and that of source speakers and writers, unpredictable linguacultural influences and unorthodox usage conventions.
The following sections examine whether such globalized use of English in text and speech production has the potential to uproot our traditional understanding of T&I as it encroaches upon its basic norms, fundamental principles and established concepts. I will start by outlining how ELF is defined and described in canonical ELF research and continue to lay out from an ITELF (interpreting, translation and English as a lingua franca) perspective, what this means for T&I — or rather what it means for interpreters and translators when they receive ELF input as opposed to the English native speaker/writer input they are accustomed to and trained for.
2. How is ELF different?
In Table 1, ELF is marked out as 'different'. Just what is it that makes ELF different?
ELF, as per scholarly definition (see throughout the Routledge Handbook of English as a Lingua Franca, Jenkins, Baker and Dewey 2018), is not viewed as a language, or a variety of English, but a communicative mode which non-native English speakers (NNES) engage in in international communication when they do not share a first language. Such ELF communication may include native speakers of English (NSE), but while "ELF does not exclude NSs of English, [...] they are not included in data collection, and when they take part in ELF interactions, they do not represent a linguistic reference point" (Jenkins 2007: 3). This is an important point to bear in mind for the investigation of the impact of this global phenomenon on translators and interpreters, because they, too, are mainly concerned with the impact of non-native English input (Albl-Mikasa 2018: 371).
While the notions of 'native speaker' (NS) or 'Standard English' (SE) must be viewed as theoretical constructs and fuzzy concepts, it can still be
assumed that the so-called 'native speakers of English comply with certain shared standards to some degree, because exposure to and participation in speech events result "in idiolects that conform to local community [...] norms" and knowledge of SE is developed "as a consequence of schooling and [...] literacy practices" (Hall 2018: 78). Moreover, in NSE communication "the pressure to align with 'target' norms is higher" (Hall 2018: 79) leading to conventionalized usage "shared [...] and recognized as being shared — by a substantial number of individuals" (Langacker 1987: 100). Such common ground (Clark 1985) of implicit grammatical and lexical knowledge is missing in ELF contexts and communication. As "ELF is the use of English between people who do not belong to the same speech communities, as they are traditionally defined" (Widdowson 2018: 106), "in many, perhaps most cases, ELF users cannot rely on a mutual knowledge of conventionalized norms" (Widdowson 2018: 110).
Investigating interpreting and translation in relation to ELF (ITELF) broaches a communicative context of multilingual speakers/writers and listeners/readers who communicate in English as their second or third language. This differs from English as a foreign language (EFL) use, which is confined to other NNSE contexts, such as foreign language learning in classroom and language teaching environments, in that "ELF lects are used [...] in authentic second language use (SLU), by speakers in the real world from professionals to tourists and asylum seekers, and in the digital world by anyone anywhere" (Mauranen 2018: 10). In this world, "English is established as the language of a heterogeneous international community" (Pickett 2011: xii) and as "a contact language arising from complex and varied situations" (Mauranen 2018: 10). In contrast to local, monolingual, and non-mobile speech communities, ELF communities are globalized networks which are multilingual, transient, fluid and often constituted ad hoc (Baker 2018: 28).
Quite obviously, the English idiolects of speakers of the same first language will "display certain similarities in pronunciation or accent, in syntactic features, lexical choices and so on", arising from contacts of a particular L1 with English, thus forming contact varieties or "similects" (Mauranen 2018: 9). Naturally, these conform to norms to a lesser degree than 'SE lects'. While in a typical contact situation speakers of different languages would use one of these languages for communication ('first-order contact'), in ELF situations, a large number of languages come in contact with English, and hybrid similects come in contact with other hybrid similects ('second-order contact') (Mauranen 2012: 30). Global contact between speakers from different similects therefore makes ELF "a higher-order, or second-order language context. Therein lies its particular complexity" (Mauranen 2018: 10).
According to Seidlhofer, there is then a clear difference between ELF and conventional native-speaker interactions:
"It is a sociolinguistic commonplace that all natural languages are variable, continually in flux, complex and endlessly emergent [...]. But English, as a global means of communication that it has become over recent decades, is a special case altogether. As a truly post-modern phenomenon, it is used by
speakers from all walks of life in all continents, with hundreds of different first languages and varying degrees of 'proficiency', and in a way that demonstrates very clearly that communicative effectiveness is frequently a function of variability, of the destabilization of established linguistic norms" (Seidlhofer 2018: 85).
How, then, does ELF communication work, how is communicative effectiveness achieved, when interlocutors cannot assume predetermined shared norms and only partial conformity with native-speaker conventions? It is on the basis of "shared communication strategies, a collaborative disposition, and the deployment of linguistic resources shaped by similar Englishing experiences" that they "engage successfully in joint cognition" (Hall 2018: 79). Empirical ELF studies highlight "accommodation, communicative and pragmatic strategies such as pre-empting misunderstanding, repetition, ex-plicitness and code-switching" (Baker 2018: 33) and "the importance of adaptation, negotiation and co-construction" (Baker 2018: 30) as a cooperative means of compensating for the lack of common ground. Enhanced explicit-ness, known as explicitation (Blum-Kulka 1986) among the universals of translation, has been found to "take the form of frequent paraphrasing, rephrasing and repetition, or syntactic strategies like fronting or tails" (Mau-ranen 2018: 14) in ELF conversations. Similarly, ELF interaction manifests a preference for the progressive form, the most frequent vocabulary, structural simplification, morphological regularization as well as "a large number of non-standard expressions" (Mauranen 2018: 14).
In order to bridge potential language- and culture-related gaps, people from different primary cultures and communities, in a creative process, continually adapt and appropriate their multilingual resources to meet contextual demands and the requirements of the moment (Seidlhofer 2018: 98). In mobilizing multilingual resources, speakers are found to "'soft-assemble' (Thelen and Smith, 1994) their language resources in the moment to deal with the exigencies at hand" (Larsen-Freeman 2018: 53). In drawing on whatever (multilingual) resources they have at their disposal, users will come up with innovative patterns and non-conformist variants. Among these are what Mauranen calls "approximations" (2018: 18), phrasal or multi-word units which formally or semantically resemble — but do not match — conventional English expressions (e. g. to put the end on for to put an end to, Mauranen 2013: 241). ELF is viewed as "an open-source phenomenon" (Co-go and House 2018: 210), which is constantly adapted and re-fashioned and varies accordingly. It is this variety and variation that interpreters and translators are confronted with in source texts and speeches.
Interpreters, in particular, would concur with the ELF tenet that it is communicative effectiveness rather than linguistic correctness that matters (Seidlhofer 2018: 93), that 'SE' is an institutionalized construct rather than a reality and that native-speaker usage, too, frequently deviates from standard, at least in spoken usage. However, the particularities of ELF described above impart on it a degree of unpredictability, augmenting the difficulty factor far beyond native English usage.
3. What makes ELF (input) challenging for interpreters and translators?
From the ELF research literature review above and preliminary evidence emerging from the younger sub-discipline of ITELF, the following implications for translators and interpreters can be put forward.
3.1. Multilinguality
ELF contexts are characterized by a complex mixture of several co-present languages. Conference settings can be particularly complex secon-dorder language contexts when speakers with different similects congregate. "Similects originate in cross-linguistic influence" and have "special features resulting from cross-linguistic transfer" (Mauranen 2012: 29, 30). Conference interpreters will therefore be faced with transfer from numerous more and less common languages. Potentially, they may be dealing with an "English [that] comes into contact with virtually the entire range of human languages" (Mauranen 2012: 17), turning a bilingual task into a multilingual one. Albeit in a more subtle way, this impact can also be observed in source texts for translation, as (multilingual) text producers bring to bear on their English their first and other languages. Some relief comes from the "shared languages benefit" (SLB) (Albl-Mikasa 2013: 105), according to which interpreters and translators draw upon any (working or non-working) languages they share with source text producers and which match the L1 that cross-linguistically influences the respective English usage. While this has been found to be a major resource in the recovery of meaning from unconventional English usage (Albl-Mikasa 2018: 375), the number of untraceable L1s is likely to be much higher than that of recoverable ones, due to the diverse origins of conference participants. What adds to the complexity of the mix is the fact that L1 transfer is inversely proportional to language proficiency. The weaker speakers' command of English, the more they depend on direct translation from their L1, according to bilingualism research (Pavlenko 2005: 438, 446).
In fact, ELF contexts being inherently multilingual (Mauranen 2013) and bilingual speakers' languages being constantly co-activated and mutually influencing each other (Jarvis and Pavlenko 2007), L1 transfer and other bilingual phenomena are the norm rather than exception in ELF communication. Anecdotal evidence of stylistic blunders resulting from the transcoding of idiomatic phrases and collocational patterns or the misguided use of false friends and cognates abound among interpreters, who report of housekeeping source phrases such as "don't take the interpreters to your room, lay them on the table" (from German "nehmen Sie Ihre Dolmetschempfangsgeräte nicht mit aufs Zimmer, legen Sie sie auf den Tisch" [do not take the interpreting devices to your room, leave them on the table], Albl-Mikasa 2015). Another example would be an Italian ELF speaker's use of 'voice' from Italian 'voce' meaning both 'voice' and 'item on a balance sheet' in a corporate finance context. An interpreter working from English into German
or French and unfamiliar with Italian would be hard-pressed to recover the intended meaning. A translator unfamiliar with Italian would, at the very least, need to invest extra time on the translation of the expression.
3.2. Norms
Language norms refer to habitual linguistic behaviour emerging from repeated usage and gradual acceptance. Apart from possibly being codified, they "describe what is common in a particular setting" and "are what is expected/accepted in a particular setting" (Hynninen and Solin 2018: 268 — 269). This means language norms can provide some common ground and guide prediction. In ELF contexts, however, the default assumption of shared community norms (Hall 2018: 75) no longer holds. As outlined above, compensation consists in interactive communicative strategies, common ground negotiation and pragmatic adaptation. This, however, requires an interactive set-up, while (conference) interpreting and translation are predominantly performed under monological non-interactive working conditions, where there is no room for meaning negotiation or the co-construction of common ground. When norms become inaccessible in ELF-based (monological) interpreting and translation settings, they cannot perform their function as a compensatory source of common ground or facilitator of prediction. Prediction, in turn, is fundamental to language processing. It depends on the bottom-up activation of knowledge structures allowing for the creation of top-down expectations on different levels of language processing (Otten and Van Berkum 2008). Such expectations guide coherence-building, i. e. the formation of a plausible mental representation of the (source) text world in the comprehension process. Language prediction is also facilitated by structural symmetry between source and target language (Hodzik and Williams 2017). If, on top of an asymmetrical language pair (e.g. English — German), the input cues are 'non-standard' or 'odd', fundamental prediction and anticipation processes may be undermined. As a result, interpreters and translators will have to normalize (see Hewson 2009: 119) and pre-edit norm-digressing input, adding further to cognitive load. The more norms blur in globalized communication, the more this will be felt by interpreters and translators and weigh on their capacity management.
3.3. Culture
In ELF contexts, there "may be no clearly distinguishable L1 culture that participants identify with or refer to" (Baker 2018: 28). Traditional mediation between source and target culture is therefore no longer applicable. Instead, interpreters and translators face up to English source speeches and texts which they cannot assimilate with a British, American, Australian or other L1 cultural background. This may deprive them of a major contextual determinant for sense-making. Questions arising during translation regarding domestication, foreignization or skopos may be unanswerable. This is not to say that texts produced in native-speaker settings come with a culture tag attached. According to contemporary research, cultures are generally con-
sidered "as complex and fluid sets of beliefs, ideologies and practices that are always transitory, partial and in a constant state of emergence" (Baker 2018: 30). However, globalization acts as an amplifier of social, cultural and linguistic diversity, bringing together people "with very different backgrounds, resources and communicative scripts", destabilizing "assumptions of common ground" and "of mutual understanding and the centrality of shared convention" (Blommaert and Rampton 2011: 6). Patchworked lin-guacultural backgrounds lead to a widening of culture-related gaps, "inter-culturally mixed communicative conventions" and "pragmatic hybridity", producing a mix that "poses a challenge" (Ehrenreich 2018: 47). This is accentuated in monological T&I settings, where culturally based frames of reference cannot be negotiated.
3.4. Source text/speech
English as a speaker's additional language will be weaklier cognitively entrenched than their first. Success in the ELF mode depends on the degree of control over L2 resources and their convergence with native speaker ones (Hall 2018: 74). "Indeed sometimes, the speakers who participate in ELF events are 'highly' non-proficient speakers of English or, more generally, insecure communicators, causing more or less visible communicative problems of various kinds" (Ehrenreich 2009: 145). What interpreters and translators will have to reckon with is that their source input — and with it their performance — is determined by "the variety and unpredictability of language parameters: interlocutors' accents, transfer features, and proficiency levels" (Mauranen 2012: 7). Ordinary conversational compensation mechanisms such as "fuzzy processing" and a "tolerance for fuzziness" (Mauranen 2018: 18) or a let-it-pass attitude towards "anomalous [...] and [...] at times acutely opaque usage" (Firth 1996: 247) are counterproductive for interpreters and translators, since in-depth comprehension as well as accuracy and completeness of rendition are non-negotiable.
Anomalous usage has been described in more detail for English as a lingua franca discourse by Kecskes und Kirner-Ludwig (2019) as "odd structures". A structure is defined as 'odd' if it "violates the structural dimension, i. e. saliently and conventionally expected sequences" or "puts forward contradictory information and breaks the topical or situational frame of a convention" (2019: 76). At the same time, the authors highlight that odd structures "only potentially put mutual understanding and successful communication between the interlocutors at risk" and are not regarded as mistakes on the speaker's part, but considered "the best option a speaker is able to retrieve at the moment of speech in their sincere attempt to get their message across as comprehensively as possible" while "working around any self-perceived grammatical, lexical or idiomatic pitfalls [...]" (2019: 77). At the same time, this cautiously optimistic take is again set against the analysis of conversational interactive encounters rather than monological, non-interactive T&I settings. Factoring in this fundamental difference makes the more critical stance taken by many interpreters more plausible. Interpreters, in fact, liken ELF to BSE (Bad Simple English), Globish, Lego English and
even desesperanto (Albl-Mikasa 2018: 372). It must be borne in mind that poor quality source texts are among the strongest predictors of interpreting difficulties (Gile 2009: 200) and that the "problem triggers" (2009: 193) presented by Gile — namely, "high density of the information content", "excessively slow speech rate" (chunks of information having to be stored in the short-term memory longer), "strong accents and incorrect grammar and lexical usage" (increasing processing capacity requirements), "unusual linguistic style and reasoning style" as well as "low anticipability of the source speech" (2009: 193, see also 200, emphasis in the original) — are particularly typical of ELF speech. High information density or an emphasis on factual information, for instance, has been found in ELF speaker output as a result of insufficient resources to engage in meta-discourse or in the delivery of subtler nuances (Albl-Mikasa, Guggisberg and Talirz 2017).
This may call for a rethink of the traditional notions of speaker fidelity and loyalty as part of T&I quality. Adherence to the core principle of an accurate and complete rendition can hardly be an ultimate guideline under ELF conditions. Interpreting and translation will now involve at least elements of normalization and optimization of source texts, and perhaps even autonomous text production. It is almost impossible not to do injustice to the speaker when deciding whether to reproduce source weaknesses or smooth-en out the source text into a coherent target text. This decision, in turn, is reliant upon the interpreter or translator grasping the intended meaning in the first place. Having to engage in compromised performance quality may deal a blow to professional ethics.
4. A shift in paradigm for translation and interpreting studies?
As outlined above, ELF changes the T&I task in a rather fundamental way. Interpreters and translators have to make a far broader range of choices regarding both the source and the target text. As mentioned at the outset of this article, in community interpreting, the (active) coordinating role of the interpreter in dialogic interaction (such as during a doctor-patient encounter) has been declared part of the interpreter's choice of specific courses of action under the DI paradigm presented above. Such 'agency' or 'spaces of freer ability to determine interactional moves' (Hlavac 2017: 198) is often seen as a distinguishing feature between community and conference interpreters, the latter held to be committed to the conduit ideal or even norm. While from a situated cognitive perspective, agency is a highly relative matter, depending on the interplay of situational and cognitive determinants in both community and conference interpreting (Albl-Mikasa 2020), it is fair to say that in conference interpreting settings translational choices are usually more narrowly channeled along conduit-related lines and active agency is exercised in a much more subtle fashion with a general preference for a more passive role. ELF conditions may change this picture. Interpreters now have no choice but to make choices. In fact, they are in a constant additional decision-taking loop: plausibility checks when source text expressions or passages are unclear; meta-reflections as to whether speakers can be trusted in their linguistic abilities and in selecting words to reflect their underlying
intentions; out-of-the-box trains of thought as to the meaning underlying L1 transcoding and as to what the speaker would have said had he been able to express himself in English more proficiently; concerns regarding canonical requirements such as speaker fidelity in the light of necessary optimization and compensation measures; etc. Interpreters' search for low-capacity automatized flow is further undermined by constant resource-intensive meta-ref-lective decision-making.
Moreover, in community interpreting, agency is taken to level out unclear utterances or false claims by migrants or poorly phrased questions and an incorrect understanding of the exchange by institutional providers (In-ghilleri 2005: 81). Similar levelling out of unclear, poorly phrased or even incorrect source input may be called for under ELF conditions, albeit in mo-nological contexts. In community interpreting, interpreters' agency may lead to intercultural adaptation, blurring the line between interpreting proper and (intercultural) mediation (Baraldi 2019: 333). Similarly, interpreting under ELF conditions may verge on approximation and some new form of 'interlingual' mediation. This questions the notions of accuracy and fidelity, impartiality and neutrality, shaking the very (ethical) foundations of conference interpreting.
The increased text production autonomy and dissociation from the fidelity norm lead on to transcreation. The emphasis here is on reconstruction rather than reproduction in order to meet the informational needs of participants. For Katan (2016), the logical step forward is for interpreters and translators to leave the traditional 'faithful' path behind and "step into the role of transcreator, which would allow them to take advantage of an already assigned professional recognition of their creative role". While the traditional way forward involves less risk, the transcreational turn promises to give interpreters and translators an edge over machines, not to mention munition to argue that not just anyone can do the job. Such broadening of translators' "professional opportunities and range, developing an extended self-concept as intercultural mediators, adaptive transcreators and language consultants" (Massey and Wieder 2019: 76) is meant to counteract the pervasive inroads being made by machine translation. In the face of the similarly ubiquitous spread of ELF, too, it may seem like a logical step forward. Interpreters and translators might even leverage their special expertise in dealing with the intricacies of ELF as a USP. Whether clients will be prepared to cover the cost of the extra cognitive effort and temporal resources required for compensation, normalization and optimization measures is another question to be answered.
Where does that leave us regarding the question of a paradigm shift? There is no doubt that globalization and information technologies have been causing upheaval in the T&I landscape, embedding translation in new practices and contexts. ELF, in particular, along with the transidiomatic practices, global Englishes and transcultural flows, mobile resources and translingual practices it entails (Seidlhofer 2018: 96), is bound to impact the task. However, pending further empirical research the question remains unanswered. Very little empirical research and robust evidence have been produced due to a dearth in studies into ELF in relation to interpreting and translation (an
overview of studies carried out thus far is given in Albl-Mikasa 2018 and Albl-Mikasa 2021). A notable exception is the current CLINT project (Albl-Mikasa et al. 2020, Ehrensberger-Dow et al. 2020), dedicated to a multi-method study of the extra cost involved in processing ELF and to the question of what interpreters and translators actually do in rendering ELF input: what strategies and coping tactics they use, what rephrasings, fleshing out of proposition and optimized renditions they opt for. The results (expected in 2022) will help to determine the creative and creational liberties necessary in dealing with ELF input, the extent to which the T&I task is actually different and the degree of necessary rethinking of interpreting and translation proper. For the time being, I can only conclude by highlighting that interpreters and translators used to provide common ground between source speakers and target audiences based on the assumption that common ground between source speaker and interpreter/translator was a given or, cognitively speaking, almost automatically established. Now interpreters and translators not only have to make a much more conscious effort to establish common ground (adding to cognitive load), but also have to work with the uncertainty that common ground with the text or speech producer may not have been achieved in their target text rendition. It is one thing to live or work with compromises, but quite another to be held accountable for the possible consequences that may result from source input which is beyond their control.
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The author
Dr Michaela Albl-Mikasa, professor of Interpreting Studies, Institute of Translation and Interpreting, School of Applied Linguistics, ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland. E-mail: [email protected] ORCID: org/0000-0003-0933-574X
To cite this article:
Albl-Mikasa, M. 2022, English as a lingua franca — a paradigm shift for Translation and Interpreting, Slovo.ru: baltic accent, Vol. 13, no. 1, p. 65—81. doi: 10.5922/ 2225-5346-2022-1-4.
■SUBMITTED FOR POSSIBLE OPEN ACCESS PUBLICATION UNDER THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THE CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION (CC BY) LICENSE [HTTPJ/CREATIVECOMMONS 0RG/LICENSES/BY/4.H/)
АНГЛИЙСКИЙ КАК LINGUA FRANCA: СМЕНА ПАРАДИГМЫ В ПИСЬМЕННОМ И УСТНОМ ПЕРЕВОДЕ?
М. Альбль-Микаса
Цюрихский университет прикладных наук Швейцария, 8401 Винтертур, Театрштрассе 15с Поступила в редакцию 30.04.2021 г. doi: 10.5922/2225-5346-2022-1-4
Глобальное распространение английского языка привело к фундаментальным изменениям в письменном и устном переводе. Ранее перевод представлял собой двуязычное посредничество между носителями английского языка и реципиентами текста перевода. В настоящее время исходящее сообщение чаще создается неносителями английского языка. Этот факт способен перевернуть традиционное представление о процессе устного и письменного перевода. Цель данной статьи состоит в анализе отличий исходного текста, созданного неносителями английского языка в условиях его глобального распространения, от исходного текста, созданного носителями языка, с которым ранее имели дело письменные и устные переводчики. В статье оцениваются последствия и степень изменения ситуации межъязыкового посредничества между неносителями и реципиентами текста перевода по сравнению с традиционной ситуацией, когда перевод осуществлялся между носителями и реципиентами, говорящими на своих родных языках. Кульминацией работы является размышление о том, есть ли основания говорить о смене парадигмы в исследованиях письменного и устного перевода.
Ключевые слова: английский язык как lingua franca, письменный перевод, устный перевод, смена парадигмы, неносители английского языка, действия
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Об авторе
Д-р Микаэла Альбль-Микаса, профессор кафедры устного перевода, Институт письменного и устного перевода, Школа прикладной лингвистики, Цюрихский университет прикладных наук, Швейцария.
E-mail: [email protected]
ORCID: org/0000-0003-0933-574X
Для цитирования:
Альбль-Микаса М. Английский как lingua franca: смена парадигмы в письменном и устном переводе? // Слово.ру: балтийский акцент. 2022. Т. 13, № 1. С. 65-81. doi: 10.5922/2225-5346-2022-1-4.
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