Interpreters’ gestural profiles across settings: A corpus-based analysis of healthcare, educational and police interactions
Monika Chwalczuk
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Title
Interpreters’ gestural profiles across settings: A corpus-based analysis of healthcare, educational and police interactions
Abstract
Embodied semiotic resources, such as hand gestures, are increasingly recognised as essential tools in interpreter-mediated communication. Most multimodal studies on public service interpreting (PSI) rely on microanalytic frameworks, providing fine-grained analyses of excerpts of authentic interactions. However, such case-oriented approaches are based on data sets that are too limited in size to reveal overarching patterns governing multimodal activity in PSI. This study addresses the gap by investigating dominant trends in interpreters’ gesture production across healthcare, educational, and police settings. A corpus of video recordings featuring 24 interpreters is annotated in ELAN. Statistical analysis reveals minimal variation in the distribution of gesture types across contexts, with pragmatic and deictic gestures dominating. Interpreters’ gestural profiles closely align with those of primary speakers, suggesting that interpreters adapt their gestural production to match speakers’ multimodal activity. A qualitative analysis of 45 cases of gestural mimicry suggests that it is used as a cognitive-aid strategy, as well as a means to disambiguate lexical items and support conceptual grounding and participatory sense-making among interactants. Further research is needed to explore the cognitive mechanisms behind the recurrent patterns of interpreters’ gesture production and to evaluate the impact of gestural mimicry on users’ perceptions of interpreter performance.
Keywords
Public service interpreting, co-speech gestures, gestural profile, gestural landscape, mimicry, triangular mirroring