Migration representations – representing migrations in Interpreting Studies

Interpreter-mediated communication may occur in a wide range of situations, involving a variety of participants with dierent roles. These may likewise include migrant people and/or other subjects speaking to or about them, as is commonly the case in asylum hearings and other public service interpreting settings (mostly with liaison or short consecutive interpreting) and European Parliament debates (with simultaneous interpreting), respectively. The research areas and problems that are more orthodox in Interpreting Studies in relation to migrations, as well as the linguistic representations therein, are examined in this chapter by adopting a discourse analytical approach, aided by corpus linguistics. Using the Routledge Encyclopedia of Interpreting Studies (Pöchhacker 2015) as a corpus, the following terms are searched for collocations and co-text: migration(s); migrant(s); immigrant(s); immigration; refugee(s); asylum. The resulting occurrences provide insight into the research areas mentioned in the corpus (e.g. ‘Community Interpreting’, ‘Dialogue Interpreting’, ‘Child Language Brokering’, interpreters’ ‘role’ and ‘positioning’) as well as lexico-semantic features which depict or accompany the phenomenon (e.g. ‘procedures’, countries such as ‘Australia’) and the subjects under consideration (e.g. ‘parents’, ‘refugees’, but also ‘tourists’, ‘deaf people’). Overall, the bulk of the research mentioned in the corpus pertains to interpreter-mediated communication with/to migrant people and not about them. With a view to redressing this imbalance, some potentially rich data sources are among the recommendations provided for prospective future developments of this line of research in Interpreting Studies.