Borrmann, M. (2004) ‘Interpreting Frozen Text in the Religious Setting: The Path Toward Dynamic Equivalence’, Journal of Interpretation. Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf, Inc., pp. 75–93.
If you want to know what spoken language interpreters will be discussing in five years, ask what sign language interpreters are talking about now, I have been saying that for quite a few years now and it is still very true. In church interpreting research, the trend is even stronger. Sign language interpreters have been discussing work in church since the 1970s and the first journal article on sign language interpreting in church appeared a full six years before spoken language interpreting researchers got round to it. This is that article.
Here, Mary Borrmann takes us through the challenges of interpreting those set texts, like liturgies or prayers that are so common in church and which offer very little room for interpreters to vary what they say or sign.
Key Findings
This isn’t your classic data paper with a literature review, methods, and findings. This is more of a get-your-hands-dirty by solving a problem paper, as such, it has a lot more to do with passing on ideas and techniques than with defining and defending a theory. For some readers, that’s its attraction.
Her first point is that, while there are lots of texts like that in English, there wasn’t yet a standard way of interpreting them into ASL. The Lord’s prayer might be pretty much the same everywhere in English but it will be signed many different ways.
Another important finding was that these fixed forms give the text itself more meaning than it would have if it were just about the individual words. Reciting the Lord’s prayer, or the pledge of allegiance, or even swearing to tell the truth in court, brings with them associations and depths of cultural resonance. This provides a kind of emotional memory that is important to interpret.
The author explains that we need to reproduce equivalence anyway, despite the obvious challenges. The specific equivalence in mind here is Eugene Nida’s “dynamic equivalence.” With no official, fixed versions available, the researcher pushes for interpreters to work hard at producing versions that reflect both the cultural and history of the church (she has the Roman Catholic Church in mind specifically) and the needs and history of deaf culture. There were no easy solutions but there were approaches that could prove helpful.
Why this paper matters
There are a few obvious reasons why this paper matters. For a start, as the first ever journal article ever published on church interpreting, instead of synagogue interpreting, it deserves to be read for historical interest. We have to know where we’ve been to understand how to get to where we’re going.
The second obvious reason is that it shows that it is possible to confront challenges in church interpreting without the kind of ethically questionable blaming of interpreters found in some parts of the literature. We can and should talk about the things that make church interpreting hard and what we can do to overcome them.
The third obvious reason is that, since it is the first journal article in church interpreting, it doesn’t come with the same assumptions that we can find in the most recent articles. To read recent literature in church interpreting well, it really helps to know and understand the back story of how the research got to where it is now. The Borrmann paper comes right near the start of that story. That makes it remarkably readable for newcomers to the topic.
To these obvious reasons, we should add some less obvious ones.
While the continued uncritical use of “equivalence” in this paper grates for those trained in the years after it was published, the fact that the author could achieve so much with the theoretical tools available is remarkable in itself. There is an incredible lesson here in how to make the most of the theories and research available. If any researcher needs a lesson in lateral thinking and using theories from different disciplines, this paper provides one in spades.
Finally, and this is hard to write, it is by no means clear that the problems posed here have been solved. Twenty years later, there are still debates as to how interpreters should handle set texts and even certain items of terminology. If we learn nothing else from this paper, it should be that we really need to take a proper look at practical ways to help church interpreters solve common problems.