Abstract for “Conference Interpreters: How to Serve the Cause of Minorized Communities in the New Postmonolingual / ‘Postmonodiscoursive’ Order”

Ana Isabel Leal Lobato, University of Antwerp 

Globalization has led to changes in the field and practice of the so-called profession of conference interpreting. The arena of international conferences used to be restricted to economic and political elites. However, it has now become a diverse space, where civil society organizations are increasingly present. A paradigmatic example is the emergence of organized movements of indigenous communities reclaiming justice before international organizations. Based on the testimonies of fellow conference interpreters and my own experience as a professional conference interpreter in Brussels, I claim that international interpreted communicative events (ICE) involving minorized communities, such as indigenous peoples, give rise to new linguistic and cultural demands for the interpreting community as they depart from mainstream discourses in traditionally interpreted discourses in the international arena. Through the critical discourse analysis of a real life event involving indigenous representatives, I provide an account of recurrent patterns and translatable strategies to deal with this and comparable events aiming at facilitating conference interpreters navigate the current culturally diverse and ‘postmonodiscoursive’ order.

Keywords: globalization; conference interpreting; indigenous communities; interpreted communicative event (ICE); critical discourse analysis (CDA); ‘postmonodiscoursive order’; critical interculturality

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