The Swedish Video Relay Interpreting (VRI) Service is a facility that people who use a video phone can call in order to get in touch with people who use a telephone, or vice versa. The interlocutors have different access to the visual arena and the auditive space, and are physically separated from each other. The interpreters need to cope with this fact. In addition, the interpreter is the only one in the setting who attends the encounter as a professional representative of the service. Since “institutionality of an interaction may manifest itself in its overall structural organization” (Drew& Herritage 1992: 43), and the interaction in the VRI service follows several institutional principles, it is of interest to explicate what series of communicative projects occur, and the purposes they serve in this setting.
The aim of this presentation is to shed light on what interactional features make the VRI Service structurally institutional, with a specific focus on how communicative projects are managed among all of the interlocutors.
The study is based on twenty-five authentic calls from the regular Swedish VRI Service, Bildtelefoni.net. 15 interpreters are included in the study. Audio and video recordings were captured from the interpreters’ studio, and nobody except the interpreter was present in the studio during the recordings. The project was ethically approved by the Regional Ethical Board in Uppsala, Sweden. The analysis of the recordings is based on Conversation Analytical (CA) methodology (Sidnell & Stivers 2013), in combination with dialogical theory (Linell 1998), and focuses on what is manifested in the calls, i.e. what actually happens among the interlocutors on a moment-by-moment basis.
The result of the current study shows that the calls are systematically laminated and institutional-specific for the setting. Significant features are that the interpreter is the only one who attends the interaction as a professional, a representative of the service, whereas the other interlocutors primarily want to talk to each other through the service. In addition, the interpreter and the participant on the videophone have got visual access to each other, and the interpreter and the participant on the telephone have got audible access to each other. The communicative projects that emerge between participants are created in significant ways depended of who called the service and who is called, and depend both on the phases of the call, as well as on how the call is managed in terms of the media used (i.e. through videophone or telephone). The interpreter and the interlocutor who has called the service have got as one project of manage a call to the other interlocutor. The interpreter and the interlocutor who is called, create a project of reaching a mutual understanding of what is going on, i.e. what the call is all about. Thus, the interaction is systematically laminated by the interlocutors’ establishment of more global and local communicative projects that are dependent on the contingencies of the VRI service, e.g. the different media used, the modalities of interaction (Swedish, and Swedish Sign Language), and the fact that participants are physically separated from each other. The interlocutors co-create the call in reflexive, interactive, and dynamic ways on different levels. This structural organization of laminated systems is what manifests the institutionality of the interaction within the VRI Service.
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