Translating Risk in Speech and Gesture: Communicating Risk Across Difficult Cross-Cultural Boundaries

风险管理和沟通的审查是工程、科学和技术的伦理和价值研究领域的核心领域。本项目将利用在对南非煤矿进行为期十周的研究访问期间获得的录象采访和培训课程的数据，以便调查专家，包括专家矿工和翻译人员如何利用言语和手势来表示他们对困难的技术和体制情况下的风险的具体和分析知识。对专家和新手矿工的手势的初步分析表明，手势可能为专家在书面报告和程序之外构建风险战略表示的方式提供线索，并提出了关于工程师、经理和翻译也可能使用手势向听众传达风险的方式的问题，特别是当听众在科学和技术方面没有相同的教育、语言和文化时。具体而言，该项目将(1)比较专家和翻译人员对风险的口头（口头和书面）陈述；(2)比较专家和译者在言语和手势方面的体现观点和分析观点；(3)识别影响培训师和译者策略、话语惯例和口译策略的修辞情境特征；(4)识别影响训练策略、语篇惯例和口译策略的跨文化差异特征；(5)描述听众的期望和对修辞情境的分析；(6)总结专家在困难的跨文化背景下运用语言和手势来翻译风险的方式。虽然本研究将南非矿山作为跨文化差异的一个特定地点，但翻译风险的问题并非南非独有。随着美国企业在全球经济中扩大制造和生产基地，风险传播者必须将安全实践跨越其他可能不太明显的文化和科学界限。最终，该项目将得出理论结论，即对手势的理解可以帮助专家、翻译和口译人员克服书面和口头风险表达的文化和语言限制，并扩大对语言与科学参与生活活动之间关系的认识。

The examination of risk management and communication are areas central to the field of ethics and values studies of engineering, science and technology. The present project will draw upon data from videotaped interviews and training sessions obtained during a ten week research trip to South African coal mines, in order to investigate the ways experts, including expert miners, and translators employ both speech and gesture to represent their embodied and analytic knowledge of risk in difficult technical and institutional contexts. Initial analysis of expert and novice miners' gestures suggests that gesture might provide clues to the ways that experts construct strategic representations of risk outside of written reports and procedures, and raises questions about the ways that engineers, managers, and translators might also employ gesture to communicate risk to audiences particularly when audiences do not share the same education, language, and literacy in science and technology. Specifically, this project will (1) compare expert and translators' verbal (oral and written) representations of risk; (2) compare expert and translators' embodied and analytic viewpoints in speech and gesture; (3) identify features of the rhetorical situation that influence trainers' and translators' strategies, discourse conventions, and interpretation strategies; (4) identify features of cross cultural difference that influence training strategies, discourse conventions, and interpretation strategies; (5) describe audience expectations and analysis of the rhetorical situation; and (6) draw conclusions about the ways that experts employ speech and gesture to translate risk in difficult cross cultural contexts. While this research uses South African mines as one particular site of cross cultural difference, the problems of translating risk are not unique to South Africa. As US corporations expand their manufacturing and production sites in a global economy, risk communicators must translate safety practices across other, perhaps less visible cultural and scientific boundaries. Ultimately, this project will draw theoretical conclusions about the ways that an understanding of gesture can help experts, translators, and interpreters overcome the cultural and linguistic limits of written and oral representations of risk and expand knowledge of the relationship between language and the involvement of science in life activities.