Abstract

When interpreting for TV programmes the degree of prominence interpreters can take on or be given may vary both in terms of language and nonverbal communication. These aspects were extensively studied by Francesco Straniero Sergio in his groundbreaking work on Italian TV talk shows (2007). This contribution aims at following his footsteps and delving deeper into interpreters’ nonverbal communication in the same setting. Interpreters’ verbal and nonverbal behaviour has long been connected to the visibility-invisibility dualism, but data driven research has shown that invisibility is a theoretical precept, hardly found in the variety of communicative and situational contexts of real-life interpreting. On TV the interpreter’s ‘visibility’ is even more evident. In our study visibility is understood as the interpreter who does not only translate but also enters the stage as an active participant in the talk show. This change in interpreter’s positionality is also expressed by nonverbal aspects which are the focus of this study. In particular gaze, posture and gestures will be analysed and discussed on the basis of images and transcripts. The analysis shows that in our data interpreters use gaze for the purpose of turn allocation as already observed by other scholars in other settings; they use body language and facial expressions when they become the object of humour; and they integrate facial expression and gestures in their rendition, mimicking the primary participants’ nonverbal language. Far from being sanctioned by the other participants on the show, these nonverbal behaviours seem to comply with the rules of the talk show game and show great professional adaptability by the interpreters.

Keywords: media interpreting, television interpreting, nonverbal communication, talk show, proxemics, body language, gaze, gestures

1. Introduction: following in Francesco’s footsteps

Following Francesco Straniero Sergio’s footsteps is a daunting task for researchers. There are many reasons for this. Firstly, the size of his data collection which comprised over 500 different TV programmes featuring interpreters. Secondly, the depth of his analysis. And, last but not least, the large number of linguistic, interactional and nonverbal phenomena he observed and discussed thoroughly. In this article we endeavour to take his work a step further by exploring some nonverbal elements of interpreters’ behaviour during talk shows.

Nonverbal aspects of communication are ‘the complex interweaving of textual, aural, linguistic, spatial and visual resources which are defined as modes’ (Ouyang and Fu 2021: 192). Several scholars have used a multimodal approach to explore how these interactional resources contribute to meaning-making in interpreter-mediated communication. Most of them have focused on dialogue and consecutive interpreting: Bot (2005) in psychotherapeutic settings, Wadensjö (2001) in therapeutic encounters, Mason (2012) in immigration hearings, Davitti (2013, 2015) in educational contexts, Krystallidou and Pype (2018) in medical consultations, Castillo Ortiz (2015) in radio settings, among others. Our study aims at highlighting how gestures, gazes, postures and other nonverbal behaviour enhance interpreters’ visibility and position them with respect to other participants in a TV talk show setting.

The concept of position in interpreting studies was developed by Mason (2009) to better describe the dynamic and joint nature of an interpreter-mediated interaction where participants constantly negotiate their position. The analysis of images and transcripts of interactional sequences in our data suggests that interpreters are not only ‘reactive’ participants understood as someone who hears a message and reproduces it in another language but can become active participants (as already seen in other settings, see for instance Baraldi and Gavioli 2012) in the show and change their position through gestures. Although our investigation is not based on multimodal methodology and tools, we believe it provides some further insight into interpreters’ nonverbal behaviour, to be compared with findings of future studies in this area.

The myth of the interpreters’ invisibility, challenged already by Kopczyński (1998) was definitively debunked at least a couple of decades ago in the seminal work by Wadensjö (1998) who showed their active participation in the conversations they interpret in terms of talk and interaction coordination in various settings. The topic of visibility is still being discussed and has been extended from language to nonverbal behaviour. Li, Liu and Cheung (2023) have analysed interpreted press conferences to study this aspect both in terms of autonomous verbal and nonverbal production, for instance the interpreters’ laughing and nodding after being congratulated for their work. In this contribution we focus on nonverbal moves produced by the interpreters either on their own initiative or as a response to a prompt or an elicitation by the hosts or guests of TV shows who at times ‘use’ the interpreter for their entertainment purposes. Before discussing some images and sequences of talk extracted from a set of video-recordings (Section 5), we will look at part of the heritage Francesco Straniero Sergio left to researchers of TV interpreting in general and to our subject in particular (Sections 2 and 3), we will then present and discuss our material and methods and the nonverbal features we focus on (Section 4) and draw some conclusions (Section 6).

2. What exactly is TV interpreting today?

Given the dazzling evolution of communication technologies from traditional TV networks to cable, satellite and internet media, and the trend from broadcasting towards narrowcasting (Metzger 2017), TV interpreting is by far no longer what it used to be until a decade ago. A conceptual redefinition is outside the scope of this paper, but some considerations about the changing landscape in this area seem appropriate. Until the spreading of home videorecorders, a television broadcast (no matter whether live or pre-recorded) was an event accessible almost exclusively to those who watched it while it was aired. After the screening, if at all, it could only be retrieved with some effort (and often at great expense) in public or private archives, such as the Italian national broadcasting company’s archive, Teche Rai which Francesco Straniero Sergio frequently attended. Advances in and diffusion of recording technologies first, and the booming of Internet and YouTube shortly after, together with the mushrooming of satellite channels and web TVs, distribution platforms and video news agencies opened up the possibility of repeated access to broadcast contents, though often only for a limited period of time. Non-live and on-demand viewing is currently far more widespread than watching ‘live’ broadcasts. Furthermore, the distinction between events designed to be followed in real time – albeit remotely – by viewers in different countries (for example the yearly awards ceremony of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences widely known as the Oscars) and events that are livestreamed or made accessible to the public for reasons of transparency or information has become blurred. Meetings and sessions of international institutions such as the European Parliament are now available on digital channels and can be shared (more or less easily) via different media. The talk show everyone is talking about, a press conference held last month or a UN General Assembly session held a few years ago can be viewed and often downloaded in virtually any moment – and with them the voices of the interpreters who translated them. The growing trend towards media convergence led to apply the concept of transmediality also to interpreting (Castillo Ortiz 2021). In line with this evolution, our recordings were partly recorded from TV broadcasts, partly retrieved from Internet websites and platforms and they span the years from 1994 to 2018.

3. Francesco’s heritage

Francesco Straniero Sergio and the legacy of his research work are in many ways unique. His seminal book on interpreting in Italian talk shows published in 2007 is one of the very few monographs, alongside one on modality management in simultaneous interpreting of Chinese government press conferences (Li 2018) and three handbooks mentioned in the IRN Bibliographic Bulletins of 1997-1999 (Kisa 1997; BS Hōsōtsūyaku gurūpu 1998; n.a. 1999, all in Japanese). With the exception of Li, published in English, the lack of translations into other languages limits the accessibility of the other four books.

The most extensive body of research work on media interpreting^[1] produced during the last fifteen years we found in our review of over 240 research papers concerns news interpreting, in particular press conferences (often compared to diplomatic interpreting) and political speeches in general – for example those involving members of the government and officials of the People's Republic of China in various contexts from the 1990s onwards (Pan and Wang 2021). The broadcast press conferences of high-level politicians have also been the subject of a number of doctoral theses (including Wang 2009; Liu 2010; Sun 2011; Guo 2012; Dai 2015). The publications that are accessible in Western languages suggest that no single corpus of these materials has been created, and often scholars have each worked on their own materials. Chinese-English TV interpreting corpora to date include the Chinese-English Conference Interpreting Corpus (CECIC 3.0 and 4. 0) produced by the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (Hu and Meng 2017; Li 2018); the CE-PolitDisCorp assembled by Gu for his doctoral research (2018) and analysed in several papers under different angles; the Chinese-English Interpreting for Premier Press Conferences Corpus (CEIPPC; Wang and Zou 2018), and the open-access Chinese-English Political Interpreting Corpus (CEPIC; Pan 2019), one of the largest corpora of political interpreting, collected at Hong Kong Baptist University.

The interpretation mode used in the different corpora is not always mentioned, but it is mostly consecutive or both consecutive and simultaneous^[2]. Li’s doctoral thesis (2022) discusses consecutive interpreting in press conferences held at the American Institute of Taiwan (AIT); Li, Liu and Cheung (2023), mentioned above, is a follow-up study on the same data.

Of interest to our study are also Fu’s socio-semiotic analysis of shifts in modalising expressions (2018) and of hedging (Fu and Tan 2024) related to interpreters’ identity in interpreting governmental press conferences. Identity changes and role swaps had been already observed by Straniero Sergio in TV contexts in what he called ‘antagonistic mediators’, that is presenters or journalists who temporarily act as interpreters. This topic, observed with particular frequency in radio broadcasts, was further investigated by Englund Dimitrova (2019) who discussed the example of a dual-role mediator in a Swedish talk show, and by Ghignoli and Torres Díaz (2015) in the interpretation of sport interviews on Spanish television. Examples of dual-role interpreting can occur also when interpreters temporarily step out of their role to become active participants of the televised conversation (Sannolla 2023, Harari 2023) or in the interpreter-editor-commentators of some Turkish news channels described by Arzık Erzurumlu (2016, 2019).

One of the richest strands of investigation Straniero Sergio left us, however, is devoted to talk show interpreting, analysed mainly in terms of interaction and participation framework using the tools of conversation analysis. Falbo (2012) and Amato and Mack (2016), who compared some of Straniero Sergio’s data to data collected in other settings, were able to highlight similarities in interpreters’ conversational and interactional behaviour. Caniglia and Zanettin (2021) analysed two cases of confrontainment with the interpretation of conflict interviews involving multiple participants. The paramount work by Straniero Sergio on talk show interpreting also inspired a number of MA theses in interpreting studies^[3], including the one this contribution stems from (Harari 2023). Sannolla (2023) took up concepts elaborated by Straniero Sergio for the analysis of on-stage consecutive interpreting in infotainment programmes and applied them to simultaneous interpreting in a popular Italian talk show (cf. also Sannolla et al. in this special issue).

4. Materials and methods

The following subsections describe our data collection and selection as well as the methodology and tools adopted to identify and analyse some categories of nonverbal behaviour by interpreters in our recordings of Italian TV talk shows.

4.1 Main features of the talk shows in our dataset

Talk shows can be defined as entertainment programmes based on conversations (Menduni 2005). They are designed to talk about any subject, and this makes them adjustable both to the targeted audience(s) and to the state of the situation and time of broadcasting. In terms of content, they are a mixture of entertainment, information, advertising, promotional and even emotional content (emotainment) where different languages, codes and styles coexist (Straniero Sergio 2007: 83). The main players in the talk show are usually the host and the guest(s), but often the audience in the TV studio is involved too in what would otherwise be a bidirectional conversation. In fact, ‘[t]he people speaking in the studio or other contexts do not appear to be either talking to themselves or locked in private discourse from which viewers and listeners are excluded’ (Scannell 1991: 1); in other words, as Hutchby (2005: 449-450) puts it,

the talk can often be seen as exhibiting ambivalence between whether it is designed primarily for the audience or primarily for the co-present participants. That ambivalence can be intensified when the program involves a studio audience […]. Studio audiences are frequently present in talk shows as well as game shows, but their role can vary between acting merely as the providers of laughter and applause, to being centrally involved as participants in the show’s spectacle.

This apparently inclusive nature of the communication events ‘on show’ makes them multifaceted and quite complex, and therefore an interesting object of study under the Conversation Analysis (CA) paradigm.

Another peculiar feature of talk shows is that talk must appear as spontaneous as a mundane daily conversation among ordinary people. As described by Hutchby (2005: 449), also based on Scannell’s work (1996),

CA studies have repeatedly shown that broadcast talk simultaneously exhibits features characteristic of private talk (casual conversation) and expressly public talk (that directed at a listening audience). It is in part by virtue of its being thus ‘between’ the private and the public that broadcast talk achieves its qualities of sociability and utterly ordinary accessibility.

When a star or an idol is asked to share personal experiences or details of their life on TV, they become ordinary people and establish an intimate and familiar relationship with the audience – both in the studio and at home – who feels personally involved in the conversation. Another essential ingredient of talk shows is therefore their focus on relational and emotional aspects in communication. The aim is to cause a reaction, be it amazement, embarrassment, revulsion, or joy. What matters is keeping the viewers engaged and discouraging them from changing channels. To this end, topic changes are very frequent, humour is common, and even the most serious conversations are of limited duration (Wadensjö 2008: 124).

As Straniero Sergio observed, ‘[b]y emphasizing the intrinsic roles of the TV game, talk shows devalue the skills linked to professional roles of the participants and value their entertaining abilities’ (2007: 169; authors’ translation). This is true of interpreters as well as of hosts and guests. Rather than secondary participants who (simply) bridge (spoken) language barriers, interpreters can occasionally become both the subject/object of the narrative, or a resource to use for entertainment purposes or for humour (Straniero Sergio 2012). In those instances, the interpreter is asked either by the host or a guest to temporarily set aside the role of language expert and to follow instead the rules of the (TV) game behaving as a primary participant in the show. This possibility of a role change does not hold true for interpreters only. Straniero Sergio coined the expression ‘antagonistic mediators’ (1999a) referring to hosts or presenters who decide to replace interpreters and translate some turns of a foreign guest despite the fact that the interpreter is in the studio (cf. Section 2). Paradoxically, by playing the interpreter’s role they make the interpreter even more visible to the audience. This study presents and discusses examples of gesture, gaze, posture and other nonverbal behaviours associated with role shifts which determine a different interpreter’s position (Mason 2009) in the show and have an impact on the interpreter’s visibility. Such shifts may indeed promote entertainment, although (or perhaps because) they clash with codes of conduct for conference as well as for public service interpreters prescribing a neutral attitude and the avoidance of behaviours that are deemed inappropriate. Examples include showing agreement or disagreement with what is being said, displaying a doubtful or suspicious attitude towards the speaker, or any offensive attitude. In this sense, talk show interpreters have more leeway than interpreters at work in other settings and will not be sanctioned for their nonverbal communication, as long as it does not break any social or TV rule.

4.2 Our data: hosts, guests and interpreters

The whole dataset of this study (Harari 2023, cf. Table 1 below) consists of eight excerpts featuring interpreters from different programmes. For the purpose of this paper, three episodes from two talk shows will be discussed, namely Maurizio Costanzo Show and Stirpe Reale. The three selected episodes are in bold in the table.

Table 1: The complete dataset

The excerpts selected for this paper share a fundamental common denominator: the interpreters are on stage in the TV studio and clearly visible on screen while they assist foreign guests during their conversation with the programme host and the on-site audience.

All three episodes are led by a host who acts as the master of ceremonies. As observed by Straniero Sergio (2007: 117), also in our dataset the hosts exercise their control by setting the topics to be addressed, the pace at which these alternate, and speaking turns, sometimes acting as gatekeepers of guest digressions when these may affect the continuity or the flow of the programme. Both hosts in our recordings are very popular in Italy, have a professional background in journalism and are well known TV celebrities.

Maurizio Costanzo Show was the first, longest-running and probably best-known Italian talk show. Broadcast between 1982 and 2022, it was conceived^[4] and always hosted by the journalist and popular TV presenter Maurizio Costanzo, considered the initiator of the talk show genre in Italy. The programme featured as guests all kinds of personalities, both Italian and international, more or less well known, covering a very wide range of interests, ranging from politics to writing, from music to acting, from journalism to sports. Costanzo usually welcomed his guests on stage and offered them a seat (a sofa, chair or armchair) facing the audience with whom the guests occasionally interacted. Our data set contains interviews with the most diverse personalities, such as writer J.K. Rowling and novelist Ken Follett, actors as Kabir Bedi and Gerald Butler, and even a medium, Rosemary Altea. The episodes we focus on in this paper feature the popular Italian comedian and showman Fiorello, top model Claudia Schiffer and actor Robin Williams who interact with the host and the other guests with the help of an interpreter.

The programme Stirpe Reale (Royal Lineage), broadcast in 1998, consists of four episodes only, each devoted to one of the most popular royal families in Europe. It could be defined as infotainment, a blend of information and entertainment, but again was mainly based on conversations between the guests and the host, Cristina Parodi, a very well-known Italian TV news journalist and anchor woman. The episode we will discuss focuses on the history of the Windsor family and the foreign guest in the programme is writer Lady Colin Campbell, an expert about the history of the British royal family.

Two of the three programmes discussed here feature the same interpreter (I1) who is one of the best-known TV interpreters in Italy since she works for the main broadcasters and for the most popular programmes in Italy and was a ‘regular’ at Maurizio Costanzo Show in all the seasons the programme was aired. The second interpreter in our dataset (I2) is again well-known and has worked for various TV variety shows and infotainment programmes, including the Academy Awards ceremony for over a decade, and kindly provided the recording discussed here. In all our recordings interpreters use chuchotage (or whispered interpreting) when translating from Italian into English for the foreign guests and consecutive when translating from English into Italian for the hosts, the Italian speaking guests in the programme and the audience both in the studio and at home. In the following section we will discuss some aspects of nonverbal language that will be the focus of our analysis.

4.3 Interpreters’ nonverbal behaviour: our approach

Already at the end of last century, Poyatos stressed that paralanguage and kinetics are inextricably linked with verbal language, and ‘nonverbal modes of communication permeate also films, television, and, in any other real-life encounters, those personal interactions between two or more participants which must be mediated by an interpreter’ (1997a: 1). He had indeed observed that interpreters use also nonverbal signs to convey messages, and several times they even convey them in an exclusively nonverbal mode, and suggested that reasons for that be explored (1997b: 250). Poyatos stated that interpreters may intentionally or unintentionally accompany their target language with their own paralanguage (intonation, speed, hesitation, pitch, etc.) and kinetics. He listed a large number of specific components but suggested that they are potentially endless (1997b: 253). Reporting about his own gestures and body language in the booth, UN chief interpreter Viaggio (1997: 290) romantically describes them as follows:

Kinetics is the harmony of intonation; together they are the music of the morpho-syntactical aria the interpreter is singing. Intonation and gestures are bound to be coherent […] they follow the stream of thought and thus create their own inertia.

Krémer and Mejía Quijano (2018: 87) confirm this point stating that even when working in the booth ‘interpreters do not deliver their speeches like emotionless robots’ but reproduce a speech act in full, including nonverbal components, and that ‘changes in voice and prosody and physical movements and gestures, be they conscious or subconscious, can be observed at this stage because the interpreter is addressing the audience as a co-sender of the message’. The two authors (2018: 82) provide a more operational classification of paralanguage to be applied to interpreting, which includes voice levels (volume but also trembling for instance, pace including hesitations), pronunciation (for instance mumbling) and coincidental noises (tongue clicking for instance) while kinetics includes gestures (both voluntary and involuntary), facial expressions and gaze.

Following what Krémer and Mejía Quijano found in simultaneous interpreting and Poyatos’ suggestion to explore nonverbal mode in interpreter mediated communication, we analyse interactions involving interpreters acting on stage in talk shows. Another feature we noticed in our recordings is that interpreters at times reproduce the speaker’s attitude by mirroring both their facial expression and gestures, for example when they convey puzzlement or perplexity about something that is being said or towards someone on the show.

In the following paragraphs we shall focus on gaze, proxemics, body language, and mirroring. These aspects are inextricably linked and often are concurrently produced by both speakers and interpreters. At times they will be analysed separately just to highlight one or the other, but they often co-occur.

This study was conceived as a preliminary analysis focussing only on those kinetics components that make the interpreter’s presence in a talk show more visible and are associated with activities that are not strictly connected with translating or needed to convey a nonverbal message or expression produced by one of the primary speakers. For this reason, not all nonverbal communication by the interpreters is systematically analysed, nor was data transcribed with a specific software aligning speech with other modes of communication. Recordings were watched several times, the relevant sequences were transcribed and annotated, and frames for those sequences were extracted from the clips.

5. Data analysis

The following subsections will present and discuss the data selected for this study focusing on four nonverbal aspects described above: gaze, proxemics, body language and mirroring.

5.1. Monitoring turn allocation by gaze

An interesting aspect of nonverbal behaviour we found in our data set is the use of gaze by the interpreter to monitor conversational order and coordinate turn allocation. As already observed by Davitti (2015: 168), gaze may also have a ‘regulatory function’ among others in interpreter-mediated interactions since it can be used to contribute to the co-construction of conversational order and to coordinate sequence initiation, maintenance and closure as well as turns-at-talk. At least in principle, in interpreter-mediated face-to-face communication the interpreter translates after each turn by the primary speakers, with turn allocation occurring in different ways: the speaker or another participant may explicitly ask the interpreter to translate what was just said, or they may simply stop speaking to signal the interpreter that s/he now can translate. In some cases, though, conversation may not follow this pattern and interpreters may have to compete with the speakers to (re)gain their translation space, or to stop overlapping talk, since it is only possible to translate one speaker at a time. This requires initiatives aimed to restore the ‘default’ conversational order of interpreter-mediated communication.

The interpreter in our example uses gaze to make sure that turn allocation proceeds in an orderly manner and to prevent overlapping talk. The same use of gaze to co-construct conversational order was found by Davitti (2013) in a study about interpreted parent-teacher meetings. In the following excerpt from Stirpe Reale (cf. Section 4.2), a smooth and non-intrusive turn exchange is ensured by constant eye contact between the foreign guest and the interpreter, who implement a tacit agreement to allocate and produce each turn from start to finish without overlapping talk. The topic at talk is Princess Diana’s life and in particular her relationship with Dodi Al-Fayed (Transcript 1).

Figure 1: The guest (on the right) waiting for the interpreter to complete translation

Figure 2: Swapping turns

Figure 3: Guest starts talking

Transcript 1^[5]

The interviewee Lady Colin Campbell (G) waits for the interpreter (I2) (on the left in Figures 1-3) to complete her translation turn (Figure 1), the two then glance at each other (Figure 2) and this way signal to each other when it is time for the speaker to produce her next turn while the interpreter carefully listens to her (Figure 3). What this example shows is that at times it is also the interpreter’s nonverbal language which sets the pace and time for turn allocation and makes the two interlocutors agree on whose turn it is to talk.

This way the interpreter becomes an active participant in the exchange by co-constructing and at times managing turn allocation. She silently intervenes and with her gaze guides the conversational order so that it proceeds in the smoothest possible way.

5.2. The use of proxemics: when the interpreter becomes part of the show

Our analysis of proxemics will focus on the interpreter leaning forward or sideways to reach the recipient of her rendition, which is not an unusual position when performing whispered interpreting, as is the case in talk shows when the translation’s recipient is a foreign guest. In this case, the interpreter speaks in a very soft voice, so as not to disturb the other primary speaker(s), but at the same time she must make sure that the recipient of her interpretation can hear her. This posture of the interpreter who is whispering her translation to the foreign guest is made the object of ridicule in our data set, and prompts her to use her proxemics even more, to the point of having physical contact with one of the guests (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Guest 2 (Fiorello, far left) imitating the proxemics of the interpreter (dressed in yellow)

Figure 4 is taken from an interview with the German top model Claudia Schiffer during an episode of Maurizio Costanzo Show in 1995. The protagonists of the sequence are the top model, Italian comedian Fiorello (G2) and the interpreter (I1). Fiorello’s mocking actually makes the presence of the interpreter more relevant and visible. Her positioning becomes more active immediately after, when she is directly involved for entertainment purposes.

Fiorello uses the presence of the interpreter to make the audience laugh by making fun of the typical movements and postures that whispered interpreting entails, but in doing so he acknowledges her not only for her interpreter-persona, but as a primary communication partner.

From the beginning of the interview Fiorello lays the ground for what will become a comic scene about the interpreter: through his own body language he signals a particular interest towards the interpreter’s presence and specifically towards her job and the proxemics it involves, namely leaning towards the person(s) she is interpreting for, and he makes a surprised face to show amazement at the interpreter’s translation of every single utterance the guest pronounces.

As the conversation unfolds, Fiorello (G2) abruptly changes topic in the middle of his own utterance, addressing the interpreter (I1) with the Italian informal form of address ‘tu’ to ask her a question about her way of translating, in a mocking tone of voice which immediately sparks the audience’s laughter (Transcript 2, turn 1).

Transcript 2

The comedian clearly shows that he is not interested in the answer: he goes on with his talk and overlaps with I1’s turn. When he realises that the audience in the studio and at home may not have heard what he was saying in the stretch of overlapping talk, he re-starts his utterance (turn 5). His questions are not meant to investigate the role of the interpreter. Their purpose is humorous, and the comedian’s goal is to entertain the audience and make them laugh by making fun of the interpreter. But by doing so and involving the interpreter in the conversation, albeit briefly, he also draws the audience’s attention to the interpreter herself, thus ratifying her presence as a primary participant (turn 4) and making her even more visible. On her part, the interpreter shows amusement and acceptance of the mockery with her smile (Figure 5). Here too, her personal identity emerges as she allows herself to show a reaction that is not the professional reproduction of someone else’s behaviour, as we can observe also in Transcript 4 and in Figures  9-11 (cf. Section 5.4 below).

5.3 The body language of the interpreter made the object/subject of joke

Shortly after the episode described in Section 5.2, I1 translates an utterance by Claudia Schiffer (G1) (Transcript 3, turn 4), and Fiorello (G2) repeats her translation verbatim (turn 5), pretending he is translating for a fictional and imaginary person seated at his right (Figure 5). In doing so he mocks the interpreter’s attitude and habit of leaning towards the client’s ear to perform whispered interpreting by mimicking the same posture.

Transcript 3

Figure 5: Guest 2 (Fiorello, far left) pretending to interpret for an imaginary person, the interpreter and Guest 1 (Schiffer, dressed in green) smile at this

The active presence of the interpreter in this interaction becomes even more obvious and glaring in the following sequence where Fiorello overstates his familiarity with I1 with his gesture and body language inviting her to give him a kiss on the cheek (Figure 6). The interpreter seconds and satisfies the request (Figure 7), and the showman reacts with what seems to be a friendly gesture of appreciation (Figure 8).

Once again, the interpreter is assigned a position as ratified primary participant in the show and accepts it mainly through nonverbal expressions. Rather than questioning whether this peculiar use of proxemics is within or beyond the boundaries of an interpreter’s professional behaviour, one could argue that, as TV talk shows aim at entertaining the audience and participants, and are appreciated for their liveliness and humour, it is only fair that the interpreter too should follow the rule of the TV show game and share the interactional goal of host and guests to entertain the audience, rather than follow conventional interpreting rules about professional demeanour.

Figure 6: Guest 2 invites the interpreter to kiss him on the cheek

Figure 7: The interpreter gives Guest 2 a kiss on the cheek

Figure 8: The final reaction of the three protagonists of this scene

In Figure 8 above indeed the two guests and the interpreter appear to be partners in crime: they show intimacy in their having fun together and the interpreter’s proxemics and facial expression – she is sitting between the two guests, has physical contact and is laughing with them – make her not only visible but also acquire (temporarily) the same status of an active participant, like the guests and the host, in the show.

5.4 Mirroring the speaker’s body language

As already mentioned, body language is a substantial nonverbal resource in human communication, and our data show that interpreting is no exception. The analysis of facial expressions and gestures reveals some interesting features of the interpreter’s nonverbal communication which become relevant. In our example when somebody is ridiculed to entertain the audience the interpreter’s facial expressions convey her sense of humour and her understanding of the entertainment context as we saw already in the previous sections.

Another instrument to analyse the interpreter’s body language in talk shows is the dual concept of ghost and intruder introduced by Kopczyński (1998). The Polish author debates whether interpreters playing the ghost role should limit themselves to conveying and reproducing a message through a faithful translation, or also embody the speaker’s intent through paralinguistic and prosodic aspects. We analysed an interview with Robin Williams during the afore-mentioned TV programme Maurizio Costanzo Show interpreted by I1. In this case, the interpreter not only translates the words of the interlocutor, but she contributes to the delivery of the message by reproducing the same facial expressions and gestures of the speaker. As suggested by Transcript 4 and the Figure 9-11 below, during a group interview involving a person who claims to be a superior being, actor Williams raises his hand to ask for the floor (turn 1, Image 9) and ironically questions the attire of the other guest. His gesture is mimicked by the interpreter in her translation (turn 2, Figure 10).

Transcript 4

Figure 9: Guest Robin Williams raises his hand to ask for the floor

Figure 10: When translating the interpreter mimics the guest’s gesture

Figure 11: The interpreter reproduces the guest’s verbal and nonverbal message

Figures 10 and 11 show the interpreter frowning while translating, reproducing also with her body language the disapproval and scepticism previously expressed by Robin Williams, who now in turn looks rather amused. To accurately convey this attitude with words would probably require a lengthy and elaborated verbal expression whereas the interpreter’s facial expression mirrors the speaker’s mood and pragmatic purpose. To this respect Krémer and Mejía Quijano (2018: 87) claim that

[t]he desire to adopt the role of co-speaker makes the interpreter a fully-fledged contributor to the communication scenario by giving him/her the status of ‘participant’ rather than a third party external to the act of speech. Only when s/he becomes a true co-sender of the message can s/he really address the audience in this other language which s/he shares with them.

Poyatos (1997b: 206) goes a step further and suggests that we should ‘recognise that the barrier imposed by the purely lexical limitation of our lexicon can be overcome by means of nonverbal elements of whatever type when they are added to those words’. It is not possible to say whether these moves are conscious or instinctive and un/subconscious, but it is worth highlighting them because they illustrate the presence and active participation of the interpreters on the talk show as persons in their entirety and not only in their professional role. For sure – at least in this case – the interpreter is neither a ghost, nor an intruder, she is simply (voluntarily or involuntarily) transferring the attitude of the speaker to the recipients of her rendition. This confirms the multiplicity of positions an interpreter can dynamically take up based on other participants’ nonverbal behaviour. It also brings to light the human side of the professional who conveys not only the verbal and paraverbal expressions of the primary interlocutors, but also embodies the nonverbal components of communication.

6. Conclusions

This study attempts to expand the analysis of TV talk shows to embrace the nonverbal aspects of communication in interpreter-mediated conversations and to highlight how they may impact the interpreter’s visibility and position in the show. Our findings are limited in terms of scale, number of interpreters, TV genre and interpreting mode and therefore they cannot be generalised. Talk shows are light-hearted broadcasts based on relaxed conversations. A more adversarial interaction might have probably restricted the interpreters’ ‘behavioural space’ and nonverbal communication. Despite these limitations, however, our analysis brings once again to the fore the importance of situatedness and embodiment in interpreting ‘given the temporal and spatial immediacy of the interaction and the interpreter’s use of their body in source-text processing and especially in target text production’ (Pöchhacker 2024: 13). Francesco Straniero Sergio’s work (2007) anticipated this concept long time ago, and this study confirms this view and highlights how the conventional image of the interpreter as a secondary participant with their own professional rules and behaviours cannot fully apply in TV talk show settings. Both interpreter 1 and interpreter 2 adopt nonverbal moves which favour not only the interaction among Italian hosts and foreign guests but also their way of entertaining the audience, to the point of taking a joke and showing their own sense of humour.

The two interpreters at work in our recordings use nonverbal language for different interactional purposes which are not necessarily linked to their translation task and make them more visible than they would otherwise be. As shown in Figures 1-3 and Transcript 1, the interpreter uses gaze to guarantee a smooth turn transition between her and the guest she is interpreting, ensuring conversational order and avoiding overlapping talk. This is a self-initiated nonverbal interactional move in contrast with the following Figure (4) and Transcript (2) which feature an other-initiated exchange involving the interpreter for entertainment purposes. In this case the Italian comedian on the show ridicules the interpreter’s activity both verbally, by repeating utterances as interpreters do after each turn (Transcript 3), and nonverbally (Figure 5), by mimicking the typical interpreter’s proxemics of leaning towards the person she is interpreting for. By doing so he elicits the interpreter’s verbal and nonverbal responses and makes her more visible. Later on, during the same sequence, the comedian sets the scene for another instance of interpreter’s involvement in his act, that is, he asks the interpreter to give him a kiss (Figure 6), an invitation accepted by the interpreter (Figure 7). This temporarily changes the atmosphere and the position of the interpreter with respect to the two guests on the show. Not only do the three of them share the same space, physically and in the frame (Figure 8), but their proxemics and facial expression show complicity almost to the point of intimacy. Another aspect of the interpreter’s nonverbal behaviour which is coproduced with her verbal rendition is mimicking (Figure 9, 10, 11 and Transcript 4). Here the interpreter reproduces the same body language and facial expressions of the foreign speaker she is interpreting as if she wanted to fully convey both his verbal and nonverbal message. What emerges is that in a talk show setting the interpreter may have to adjust to the rules of the talk show game. Guests and hosts in our dataset have their own agenda and the interpreters have to use their soft skills to adapt to the situation at hand. This entails flexibility, fast decision-making and self-confidence based on the awareness that by adopting certain nonverbal behaviours one does not diminish one’s professional image as an interpreter who accepts to play by the TV show rules. More data is needed to confirm our findings and use them in interpreter training programmes which should be increasingly open to different interpreting avenues than conference or public service only.

Different contexts require different professional and personal skills, and students should be familiarised with different settings where interpreting is needed besides conferences, including TV programmes and the film industry for instance. Teaching interpreting students to adjust their professional behaviour to peculiar situations, such as the ones analysed in this study, is crucial for their future as professionals.

About the author(s)

Amalia Amato, PhD, is an associate professor in English language, translation, and linguistics at the Department of Interpreting and Translation of the University of Bologna, Forlì campus, where she teaches interpreting. She has participated in five EU-funded research projects on legal interpreting, remote interpreting, use of an AI-based CAI tool in interpreting and interpreting for accompanied and unaccompanied migrant children. Her main research interests also include interpreter education/training, media interpreting and interpreters’ health and wellbeing. She is an editor of inTRAlinea.

Shanì Harari holds a Bachelor's Degree in Interpreting and Translation Studies from the University of Trieste where she majored Spanish, English and French, and a Master's Degree in Conference Interpreting from the University of Bologna, Forlì campus, where she specialized in Spanish and English. Her Master's thesis focuses on the role of interpreters in television settings, specifically on consecutive interpreting in talk shows, with the aim of analysing the interpreter's participation and prominence in public-facing communication contexts.

Gabriele Mack is an associate professor in German language, translation, and linguistics at the Department of Interpreting and Translation of the University of Bologna, Forlì campus, where she teaches interpreting between German and Italian. She has taken part in four EU-funded research projects on pre-trial interpreting in criminal proceedings, interpreting for children in legal settings and interpreting for unaccompanied children in migration and refugee settings. Her main research interests also include interpreter education and training, assessment of interpreting as a process and a product, the representation of interpreters in literature, media interpreting, dialogue interpreting in legal settings, interpreting for children and adolescents, and interpreters’ health and wellbeing.

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