Stockholm university

Elisabeth Geiger Poignant

About me

I am a senior lecturer in Interpreting studies (Translation studies).

Teaching

I teach in various training programmes, interpretation theory, as well as in practical subjects such as consecutive and simultaneous interpretation and note-taking techniques.

Research

My research interest has – not least through my profession as an interpreter – been interpretation in all its forms. In my dissertation, I have examined interpreted public literary conversations. In the transdisciplinary field between narratology and conversation analysis (CA), as well as discourse- and multimodal interaction analysis, I apply several frameworks and methodological approaches.

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • Tolkade publika författarsamtal

    2020. Elisabeth Geiger Poignant.

    Thesis (Doc)

    This dissertation investigates the occurrence and nature of public literary conversations within the discipline of Translation and Interpreting Studies. Alongside a macro-sociological exploration of public literary talks in Sweden from 1998–2018 ­– in relation to literary translations published during the same period – the dissertation mainly presents detailed interaction analyses of three interpreter-mediated public literary conversations.

    Public literary conversations with writers, be they foreign or domestic, have gained increasing popularity in Sweden during the past decades. Talks with foreign writers are mainly held by a few large official organizers, such as the annual Gothenburg Book Fair and the International Authors’ Scene in Stockholm. Conversations that are not conducted in English require interpretation, mostly in the consecutive mode, with the interpreter sitting on the stage along with the writer and the moderator. Interpreting strategies evolve to cope with both the formal constraints and the amplifications of a staged conversation, which is generated by the contextual setting of the literary interview and its narrative turns-in-talk nature. Framed as interviews on life and culture, they range in character from spontaneous and entertaining talk to discussions of more profound ideas, and they often entail narrative passages. These properties, as well as the shifting between languages, have formal implications for their sequence structure.

    The empirical data of the thesis consists of two parts: 1) a data base of 1382 registered events, and 2) a corpus of 29 video-recorded conversations, from which three were selected for separate in-depth studies. Concepts from translation sociology are applied in study I to expound the mapped frequency and distribution of languages within public literary conversations during a twenty-year period in Sweden. The following three studies explore interpreter-mediated public literary conversation as shared, situated, and staged activity. Each conversation is characterized by a specific solution as to how talk in interaction is organized. These three studies draw on theories of interpreting as social interaction. Multimodal interaction-analytical transcription processes have been used as the core methodological approach. In study II, patterns within the interpreted conversation are tracked with topical episode analysis to see how the interpreter maintains coherence in rendering multiturn-passages of the conversation. In study III, the focus is on various phenomena that – in interaction between the writer and the interpreter – can form a unity of embodied human expression, such as prosodic trajectories and the evolvement of gestures and talk. Study IV addresses the impact of narratological elements on the sequence structure and studies how all three participants on stage, in front of the audience, communicate their involvement.

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  • Internationella författarsamtal som en arena för spridning av översatt litteratur i Sverige – historik och praktik

    2020. Elisabeth Geiger Poignant. Finsk tidskrift (7-8), 7-33

    Article

    Public literary conversations with writers, be they foreign or domestic, have gained increasing popularity in Sweden during the past decade. Conversations with foreign writers are mainly held by a few large official organizers, such as the annual Gothenburg Book Fair and the International Authors’ Scene in Stockholm. I employ research concepts from the field of translation sociology related to the distribution of source languages in Swedish literary translations, as well as to the ranking of source languages and the bibliomigration of texts in the global translation system to map the quantitative occurrence and frequency of public literary conversations during a twenty-year period in Sweden. The study makes evident that there exists a connection between the proportional use of languages in all three systems, with English as the dominant lingua franca, French and German as central, and Spanish, Italian, and Russian as semi-peripheral.

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  • The cross-lingual shaping of narrative landscapes

    2020. Elisabeth Geiger Poignant. Perspectives

    Article

    Although consecutive interpreting of longer stretches of speech inevitably involves repetition and delays, it can also be regarded as a resource for engagement in storytelling. In an open, interpreted conversation on stage about a recently published piece of literature, the participants have to manage several tasks at once: an interview with questions of public interest, a literary reading session with captivating excerpts of adequate length, and the handling of alternating languages on the floor, all within a certain time frame. In the case explored, conversational interactions on different levels are analysed to see both how cross-lingual narration is achieved and what the specific nature of an interpreter-mediated public literary conversation requires from the author, the moderator, and the interpreter performing on stage. The study also touches on the role and function of the book as a talking object in the conversation.

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  • To re-present a Nobel prize winner

    2020. Elisabeth Geiger Poignant, Cecilia Wadensjö. Multimodal Communication 9 (1)

    Article

    This article examines the unfolding of interaction in a growing and, so far, scarcely examined social and cultural practice – interpreter-mediated public literary conversations. In this context, the activity of interpreters, although indispensable when authors and audiences do not share a common language, is sometimes regarded as a “necessary evil” that allegedly causes delays and information loss. Exploring an interpreter-mediated public literary conversation with Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich as a case in point, the focus of this article is rather on what the presence of an interpreter might add to the shared performance on stage. Attention is drawn to the temporal evolvement of the interlocutor’s communicative resources, evident within narrative sequences, drawing on prosody research (Auer, 1999; Couper-Kuhlen, 1999, 2007) and research on gestures (Kendon, e.g. 2000; Streek, 2007; McNeill 2008). The study suggests that, apart from keeping the non-Russian speaking audience updated on content, the interpreter’s rhythmically calibrated performance adds an energizing asset to the event as a whole. The notion of the “coupled turn”, internally hosting gestural and prosodic coherence across topical boundaries and language frame shifts, emerges as a usable unit for the analysis.

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  • Grasping and Reproducing Topical Episode Boundaries

    2018. Elisabeth Poignant. Translating Boundaries, 203-230

    Chapter

    In Sweden, numerous public conversations on literature featuring authors from abroad are held each year. Some of those are interpreted for the audience. Interpreting strategies evolve to cope with the formal constraints, as well as the amplification of a staged conversation, which is generated by the contextual setting and culture-interview communicative activity type that is characterised by narrative turns-in-talk. By combining the concepts of topical episode coherence and (re)production format, the analysis in the present paper demonstrates how alternating bilingual updating coincides with narrative development in an interpreter-mediated dialogue, as well as how the interpreter uses variously designed communicative resources to support the moderator and the writer in co-creating the speech event. 

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