This dissertation investigates the occurrence and nature of public literary conversations within the discipline of Translation and Interpreting Studies. Alongside a macro-sociological exploration of public literary talks in Sweden from 1998–2018 ­– in relation to literary translations published during the same period – the dissertation mainly presents detailed interaction analyses of three interpreter-mediated public literary conversations.

Public literary conversations with writers, be they foreign or domestic, have gained increasing popularity in Sweden during the past decades. Talks with foreign writers are mainly held by a few large official organizers, such as the annual Gothenburg Book Fair and the International Authors’ Scene in Stockholm. Conversations that are not conducted in English require interpretation, mostly in the consecutive mode, with the interpreter sitting on the stage along with the writer and the moderator. Interpreting strategies evolve to cope with both the formal constraints and the amplifications of a staged conversation, which is generated by the contextual setting of the literary interview and its narrative turns-in-talk nature. Framed as interviews on life and culture, they range in character from spontaneous and entertaining talk to discussions of more profound ideas, and they often entail narrative passages. These properties, as well as the shifting between languages, have formal implications for their sequence structure.

The empirical data of the thesis consists of two parts: 1) a data base of 1382 registered events, and 2) a corpus of 29 video-recorded conversations, from which three were selected for separate in-depth studies. Concepts from translation sociology are applied in study I to expound the mapped frequency and distribution of languages within public literary conversations during a twenty-year period in Sweden. The following three studies explore interpreter-mediated public literary conversation as shared, situated, and staged activity. Each conversation is characterized by a specific solution as to how talk in interaction is organized. These three studies draw on theories of interpreting as social interaction. Multimodal interaction-analytical transcription processes have been used as the core methodological approach. In study II, patterns within the interpreted conversation are tracked with topical episode analysis to see how the interpreter maintains coherence in rendering multiturn-passages of the conversation. In study III, the focus is on various phenomena that – in interaction between the writer and the interpreter – can form a unity of embodied human expression, such as prosodic trajectories and the evolvement of gestures and talk. Study IV addresses the impact of narratological elements on the sequence structure and studies how all three participants on stage, in front of the audience, communicate their involvement.

På bokmässor, litteraturfestivaler och internationella författarscener anordnas årligen en mängd publika samtal med utländska författare i Sverige, och i en del av dessa medverkar en tolk. Språkförståelsen hos både moderator, författare och publik varierar. Vad krävs för att författarens budskap går fram, för att samtalet blir intressant, underhållande och informativt för den svenska publiken? Hur påverkar närvaron av en tolk ett författarsamtal?

I denna avhandling studeras sådana samtal som forskningsobjekt inom översättningsvetenskap. Studien fördjupar kunskapen om tolkade författarsamtal som ett litterärt och kommunikativt fenomen. I en av delstudierna kartläggs författarsamtalets utveckling som litteratur-evenemang och samtalens språkliga diversitet i Sverige under åren 1998–2018. I avhandlingens övriga delstudier undersöks samspelet i den tvåspråkiga kommunikationssituationen utifrån ett mikrosociologiskt, samtals- och interaktions­analytiskt perspektiv.

Multimodal analys av deltagarnas gester och prosodi belyser den tolkade turens roll i och effekter på den lokala turtagningsordningen. Narratologisk analys visar hur moderator, författare och tolk, oavsett att de rör sig fram och tillbaka över språkgränser, kan upprätthålla en obruten linje genom berättelsers olika spänningsmoment.

Elisabeth Geiger Poignant vill med sin avhandling bidra till att öka kunskapen om tolkning som interaktionell kommunikativ praktik generellt, och specifikt om hur den tar form i publika tolkade författarsamtal.