The article focuses on the problem of cultural mediation in interpreting and presents some of the most important theories regarding the topic. Firstly, the author tackles the question whether the interpreter should act as a cultural mediator at all. Then, she describes specific types of cultural differences and their influence on the communication. Finally, the article offers a list of some helpful rules established by the theoreticians, which can result helpful whenever the need for cultural mediation presents itself in interpreter’s work.
In this article, the question of different roles that community interpreters play in the context of interpreted interactions is addressed, or rather how these roles are perceived. The fact that interpreters function as mediators of pronouncements from one language to another (and vice versa) is apparent from the nature of the interpretation process itself. However, frequent studies by contemporary researchers in this field show that the role of community interpreter is clearly different from that of conference interpreter; the role of the community interpreter, as seen by several authors, often goes beyond the mediation of the language transfer of necessary information, and the interpreter is often even considered responsible for the coordination of a particular conversation between participants of interpreted communication: the community interpreter determines who is speaking and who is listening; explains to the participants what the other party mean; signals this; and explains why a certain interpreted communication was not understood by one of the parties. The specific cultural position of the interpreter can sometimes also be the reason why the interpreter “leaves his mediating role”. Interpreters always operate between two worlds which are different at different levels and which it is precisely the interpreter’s job to connect through the language transfer of communications. In the case of community interpreters, we often have to deal with striking differences in norms and values. Does the interpreter have to inform the participants of the interaction about these differences or not? Doesn’t he go too far if he actively intervenes in conflict situations in an interpreted dialogue, because the other participant doesn’t have the necessary knowledge about the cultural traditions and customs of the other party? Can we expect the interpreter to inform his client, who does not speak the language of the country in question, of his rights as soon as he notices that the other party does not respect them? The article discusses various insights into the role played by community interpreters. We start from the hypothesis that the perception of the role of the community interpreter will be highly dependent not only on different conceptual representations of individual authors but will also be differently anchored in different countries and cultures.
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During the last two decades of the twentieth century, there was a sudden surge of interest in Ernst Cassirer’s major work, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–29), and Erwin Panofsky’s essay, ‘Perspective as Symbolic Form’ (1927), an interest that has continued uninterrupted to the present day. Particularly amongst art historians, however, a serious misunderstanding remains evident here – the confusing of ‘symbolic form’ with ‘symbol’. Cultural and perceptual mediations, in which objects (and subjects) are only just in the process of forming, are carelessly turned into arbitrary, isolated objects of art history or pictorial history. Every work, in this view, is regarded as a ‘symbolic form’ to the extent that a representation of the world is ‘expressed’ in it. This article initially reviews Panofsky’s essay in order to establish the context in which the art historian uses the term ‘symbolic form’. His use of it is then compared with Cassirer’s original understanding of the term. A careful distinction is made between ‘symbol’, ‘symbolic pregnance’, and ‘symbolic form’, and this is followed by an analysis of scattered remarks in Cassirer’s writings, and particularly in his posthumous manuscripts and notes, on ‘art’ as symbolic form and on the spatial form that is prior to all perception and art production, as well as his call for a kind of art history that conceives of itself as a scholarly discipline. The article concludes with the recognition that Panofsky not only deliberately, but justifiably – that is, in the spirit of Cassirer, at least – transferred the expression ‘symbolic form’ to ‘perspective’.
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