Doctoral Degrees (Afrikaans and Dutch)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (Afrikaans and Dutch) by Author "Brewis, Carmen"

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    Die produksienetwerk van 'n getolkte lesing binne die universiteitskonteks : 'n etnografiese ondersoek
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-03) Brewis, Carmen; Feinauer, A. E.; Van Doorslaer, Luc; Lesch, Harold M.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Afrikaans and Dutch.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Spoken educational interpreting is an innovative mode of communication that is used in some tertiary institutions in South Africa. However, very little is known about the process of an interpreted university lecture, what it entails, and what educational interpreters do and experience from moment to moment. The current study was undertaken to, through a social theory of translation, gain a deeper understanding of the manufacturing process of an interpreted (spoken language) university lecture, and of the interaction between the actors involved in the production process. The study was process-orientated and made use of actor-network theory (ANT) and an ethnographic research strategy in order to gain an insider’s perspective into the lived reality of interpreting in an educational context. The epistemology of ANT allowed for investigating not only the interrelatedness between human actors such as lecturers, interpreters, and the users of the interpreting service, but also the role of the nonhuman actors in the process, e.g. the subject matter of a lecture, the interpreting equipment, the teaching aids in the classroom, and the material environment. The data consisted of a main and an additional corpus. As part of the main corpus, three interpreted lectures were filmed and recorded, and interviews were conducted with the lecturers, interpreters and users of the interpreting service. The recordings of the lectures and the interviews were transcribed and studied, together with various pieces of visual and textual data collected. As part of the additional corpus, fieldwork was conducted in 61 interpreted lectures, field notes made, and data in various forms collected and studied. In line with the tenets of ANT, a detailed description was reported of the various processes and interactions that were observed during data collection. The data showed that the interpreting product is the result of a process of network formation. Within these networks, the interpreter is not the exclusive locus of action but is enacted by multiple human and non-human actors. It became evident that actors external to the lecture and associated within strong network formations, e.g. the 2016 Language Policy, played an important role in determining interpreters’ alignment and actions during the lecture. The interpreting timetable further emerged as a vital actor that has to supply oxygen to the rest of the educational interpreting network and determines the role that interpreters can and do play. A central finding of the study was that the interpreters are not reliably and securely aligned within the institution’s networks. Within the lecture itself, the interpreters are only sporadically and partially aligned, and are not effectively integrated into the learning opportunity. As a result, interpreters have little agency or power, and are unable to consistently interpret subject-specific texts as skilled and knowledgeable agents who enhance the learning experience. It emerged from the data that the interpreters have, due to misalignment with the wider networks, configured themselves in separate and isolated networks. For interpreting to function as a vital actor in the institutional network and as an actor with indisputable value as a mechanism in multilingual education, the interpreters must be aligned within networks more seamlessly and more securely. These interpreters should be equipped for the real-life contact situations in which they work; not by limiting their actions through prescriptive norms but by providing them with enough flexibility and agency to make ethical and responsible decisions, enabling them to play a meaningful role in the teaching and learning process. Recommendations based on these findings include a re-alignment of the entire interpreting network, from the intimate spotlight in the lecture where the interpreters have to formulate each individual utterance, all the way up to the institutional level. The study proved the value of actornetwork theory in investigations into the social reality of the translator/interpreter as an agent and led to a deeper understanding of translation/interpreting as a phenomenon and as an object of study.