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

对风险管理和沟通的审查是工程、科学和技术的伦理和价值观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旅行期间获得的录像访谈和培训课程的数据，以调查包括专家矿工在内的专家和翻译人员如何利用言语和手势在困难的技术和体制环境中表达他们对风险的具体和分析知识。对专家和新手矿工手势的初步分析表明，手势可能会为专家在书面报告和程序之外构建风险的战略表述提供线索，并引发关于工程师、经理和翻译也可能使用手势向受众传达风险的方式的问题，特别是当受众在科学和技术方面的教育、语言和素养不同时。具体地说，本项目将(1)比较专家和译者对风险的口头(口头和书面)表述；(2)比较专家和译者在言语和手势方面的具体和分析观点；(3)确定影响培训者和译者的策略、话语惯例和口译策略的修辞情境的特征；(4)确定影响培训策略、话语惯例和口译策略的跨文化差异的特征；(5)描述受众对修辞情境的期望和分析；以及(6)得出关于专家在困难的跨文化语境中使用言语和手势来翻译风险的方法的结论。虽然这项研究使用南非的矿场作为跨文化差异的一个特定地点，但转换风险的问题并不是南非独有的。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那么明显的文化和科学边界。最终，该项目将得出理论结论，说明对手势的理解如何帮助专家、笔译员和口译员克服书面和口头表达风险的文化和语言限制，并扩大语言与科学参与生活活动之间的关系的知识。

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.