Co-creating an interactional space in video-interpreted interaction

Video-technology is generally considered to be an efficient way to provide interpreting services, as it allows participants to cut travel time and costs while at the same time providing an interactional space promising the participants visual access to each-other. Based on conversation analysis, this paper explores how the participants in video-interpreted hospital settings organize their interactional space, and through these actions display an orientation to the interpreters’ rights and obligations in the interaction. Although visual access is thought to benefit interpreting, this analysis shows how the participants do not necessarily create a shared interactional space displaying all the participants. In this paper, I explore how the professionals on each side of the technology (the interpreter and the medical professional) orient to the visual configuration of the setting, and how this reflects back on professional practices and mutual expectations. The participants’ visual access to each-other might be (but is not always) brought up during the opening of the video-interpreted meeting. Although participants’ lack of visual access to each-other may cause problems in the interaction (e.g. misunderstandings regarding who is referred to by the second person pronoun), questions of how to sit or visual access are not necessarily treated by the interpreter as relevant to respond to or engage with. For instance, by interpreting the medical professional’s question about seating arrangements rather than responding, an interpreter contributes to delimiting the question to a matter between the doctor and patient rather than a matter of visual access for the interpreter. While the participants’ actions indicate an orientation to perceived interactional rights and obligations of the interpreter, the visual configuration of the setting has consequences for the interpreter’s access to the interactional space and subsequently for the interpreting.