What interpreters know about where to sit
Better Translate Team ·
There is a body of research on interpreted medical consultations, and a lot of it is
about furniture.
Gaze is doing the traffic control
Studies of interpreter-mediated dialogue find that gaze, along with head orientation and posture,
carries much of the work of managing turn-taking. Eye-tracking work on these conversations describes
asymmetrical gaze patterns between the three participants, with the interpreter's timing tied to
whether mutual gaze with the clinician is available at that moment.
The practical guidance that falls out of it is blunt: seat the interpreter so the clinician and
the patient can still see each other. The interpreter is meant to be a channel, not a destination.
What goes wrong when the channel becomes the destination
Remote video interpreting research makes the same point from the failure side. Video-mediated
interaction does not permit mutual gaze in the strict sense, because each person is looking at an
image of the other rather than into the camera. The thing that carried the turn-taking is missing,
and the conversation gets noticeably harder to run.
Work on nonverbal dimensions of these consultations finds the interpreter's conduct measurably
shapes how much the patient participates. Not what gets said. How much the patient speaks at all.
A phone is a third participant whether you meant it or not
Hand your phone to somebody and you have seated the interpreter between you, facing away. They
look at the screen, you look at them looking at the screen, and nobody is looking at anybody. The
gaze channel that was managing your turns is gone, so you both fall back on gesturing and volume.
This is the thing people describe as "translation apps are awkward". Usually the translation was
fine. The seating was wrong.
Which is why the phone goes flat on the table
Split the screen, rotate the far half 180 degrees, and the phone stops being a thing you hand
over. It sits between you like a menu does. You can both read your own half without breaking line of
sight with each other, which is the arrangement the interpreting research keeps recommending.
We did not design it from the literature. We built it because passing a phone is annoying, then
found out there was a discipline that had already worked out why.