Interpretação oral inglês-português no contexto religioso: um estudo exploratório do perfil do intérprete e do processo de interpretação

Abstract

Interpretation in evangelical churches is a common practice; however, few are the studies approaching this topic in Brazil. This study aims at initiating an investigation into the interpretive process and the profile of interpreters working in religious settings. In such settings, it is usual to see foreign speakers whose words are interpreted by volunteers who perform adequately despite lacking specific training in interpretation or translation. A questionnaire was applied to three religious interpreters to identify the mode and type of interpretation used in a church in Uberlandia/MG, Brazil, and to determine the profile of the interpreters in this specific church. Then, an experiment was carried out with these three interpreters and two senior students of the Bachelor’s Degree in Translation Program at Federal University of Uberlândia. Camstudio Recorder program was used in the experiment to record the interpretation from English into Portuguese of a sermon video divided into segments of variable lengths. The starting point was the hypotheses that (1) the religious interpreters, given their experience and domain knowledge, would have better performances when interpreting worship excerpts imbued with strong biblical references, while (2) the senior translation students, given their specific training, would perform better when interpreting extremely long excerpts. The data obtained in the experiment were analysed building on the lag time between speaker’s final words and participants’ outputs (décalage, or head start), the length and the number of pauses found during the interpretive process, the size of the speech segments (i.e., number of words), and the interpreting strategies used by the participants. The results showed that the two groups of participants (i.e., interpreters and students) performed differently from a processual perspective, especially when it comes to the interpretation strategies. This points to a potential confirmation of the hypotheses, which, however, still need to be corroborated by research involving more representative samples.