First Impressions
This is one of those papers that might not have seemed like a big deal when it first came out. On the face of it, it is a pretty simple paper. The author examined interpreting in Glory Gospel Church, a migrant church in which people from the Democratic Republic of Congo worship in their new location in South Africa. The people in the church speak two languages: French and Lingala. Yet interpreting is provided into English. The job of any good researcher then is simply to figure out why that happened.
The results of that investigation deserve to be read by anyone who ever does research on church interpreting, especially those tempted to take a simplistic look at matters such as quality and expectations.
Key Findings
This paper tells us two things about church interpreting that every researcher should remember:
1) Church interpreting is often related to organisational vision
The researcher is very clear that the interpreting only exists in Glory Gospel Church because the church has a vision to reach people from across Africa. While no one in the church actually needed interpreting into English, offering it made perfect sense considering the vision of the church.
This also explained why the interpreting didn’t really work for anyone who didn’t speak French or Lingala. Since no one in the church needed English, the interpreting was more about demonstrating the vision of the church than meeting a current need. That meant the interpreters were free to switch roles, respond directly to the preacher, and even leave segments out.
2) Church interpreting is often political
Another facet of the interpreting in this church was that it reflected the church’s precarious position. As a migrant church, there was a felt need for the church to have legitimacy in the eyes of other local churches. Having English meant that one of the local languages was spoken in the church and therefore that the church might stand a greater chance of being accepted.
Why this paper matters
Not only is this paper worth reading simply because of its age, but it is also worth reading because of the extraordinary contribution it made to research on church interpreting.
Alongside the work of Jill Karlik and Jennifer Rayman, it isquoted in just about every paper on the performative side of church interpreting. It has also contributed to discussions on legal interpreting (see the recent work of Philipp Angermeyer) and anthropology.
Why is it so foundational? Firstly, it provides a powerful argument as to the importance of remembering why church interpreting exists in a given church. It would have been so easy to dismiss out of hand the interpreting found in Glory Gospel Church and simply relax into a kind of smug criticism. By taking the time to understand what is happening and why, Cécile Vigouroux exemplified an approach which church interpreting research desperately needs to recover.
Secondly, this article provides the basic building blocks for the entire understanding of church interpreting as performance. Sure, this perspective would benefit from lots of data from across the world. Yes, nowadays the connection to performance via theology (notably the New Homiletics) has become more common than Vigouroux’s use of Goffman but the appeal of this paper for understanding performance is precisely that it doesn’t appeal to theology. It stands as still the only paper linking church interpreting to anthropology, a link that remains to be fully explored.