Audio-based interpreting has lately become a widespread communicative practice in multilingual encounters. However, its linguistic-communicative requirements have hardly been explored. In this paper, I will outline the features of interactional remoteness and investigate interpreter-mediated encounters via telephone between German counsellors and Arabic clients with regard to turn allocation.
Location-independent interpreting assistance was proposed long before the emergence of the new information and communication technologies and audio-visual systems. However, audio-based interpreting (by telephone or comparable devices) has lately become a widespread communicative practice in multilingual encounters, especially as a consequence of the refugee crisis and the large influx of Arabic-speaking asylum seekers. Despite the growing need for a quick solution, the linguistic-communicative requirements for dialogue interpreting in remote mediated settings have hardly been explored (Amato/Spinolo/Rodríguez 2018, Braun 2017, Wadensjö 1999 i.a.). The presence of a third party, an interpreter, already poses challenges to the communicative dynamics in a shared space. Additional coordinating actions are essential when dealing with language barriers and knowledge divergences (Baraldi/Gavioli 2012, Bührig/Meyer 2014). The central question posed by this paper is therefore: How do the participants in interpreter-mediated counselling sessions conducted via the telephone compensate the lack of the co-presence of clients, counsellors and interpreters and which strategies are preferably employed to ensure understanding and when determining turn-taking in such exceptional circumstances? For these discursive, technical issues the participants in face-to-face encounters use various inexhaustible expression modalities of a verbal, nonverbal and paraverbal nature, something to which the participants in telephone conversations only have restricted visual and acoustic access. Yet the preliminary findings also reveal the predominantly smooth unfolding of the interaction. Hence, in this paper I will, by way of example, explore selected aspects of turn taking and coordinating processes aimed at mutual understanding within a defined setting, namely counselling refugees on their family reunification, language courses, etc. My approach draws largely upon the interaction-oriented interpreting research and conversation analysis. The data stem from audio and video recordings during interpreter-mediated encounters with German counsellors, Arabic speaking clients, and telephone interpreters.
