CONSECUTIVE INTERPRETING AND MULTIMODAL SEQUENCES

Based on recordings of naturally occurring courtroom proceedings, and using ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EM/CA) as an analytic frame, I will demonstrate that interpreters can be shown to be collaborating in the production of the questions they are interpreting, how the ‘chunking’ of narratives and expansions in smaller bits for the sake of accurate consecutive interpreting becomes a relevant issue, and how it engages issues of power in the multilingual courtroom. In the second part of this paper, I will describe the introduction of video links in courtroom and investigate how it can affect consecutive interpreting as a collaborative achievement. I will discuss how the showing of documents may be achieved with video links, and how it may put the possibility of consecutive interpreting and the validity of some of its premises to the test.