Interpretare per i minorenni: osservazioni su un'esperienza con alunni della scuola secondaria di primo grado

This dissertation focuses on the peculiarities of interpreting for children described in the literature and on the need for a specific training for interpreters and other professionals who work in this field, emphasizing the importance of collaboration among experts in the best interest of the child. The study describes four interpreter-mediated interviews with children aged 11 and 12. Each interview involves an Italian-speaking child, a professional interpreter and a German interviewer who tries to gather information about the events featuring in a video showing a mugging and watched by the four children before the interview. The interpreter’s strategies and approach were explored, together with children’s participation to the interaction. The analysis shows that the interpreter, who was not used to working with children, was able to manage the turn-taking system and to give coherence and cohesion to fragmented and incoherent turns uttered by the children. In terms of information transfer, the four interviews had a positive outcome since the interviewer got a report which was similar to the actual events shown in the video. From an interactional point of view, though, many of the rapport-building strategies used by the interviewer (repetition of the child’s name, backchannels, greetings and expressions of gratitude) were not reproduced by the interpreter in his translation. The analysis of these four interpreter-mediated interviews with children highlights that specific training to work with children would be beneficial to all participants in the interaction. In particular the interpreter should be made aware of the pragmatic and interactional consequences of her/his interpreting decisions and should be encouraged to cooperate with the person who conducts the interview so that the best interest of the child is pursued. Since our sample is relatively small and homogeneous, our findings should be further explored and expanded using more extensive and diverse data.