Abstract
The Armenian-Russian bilingualism dominating in Armenia during and after its Soviet membership is speedily transforming into an Armenian-Russian-English trilingual trio. The eroding political presence of Russia in Armenia after the collapse of the Soviet Union gradually weakened the dominant FL position of Russian in the country, creating an expansive platform for intercultural communication with the West. This, along with the advancing communication technologies, consequently strengthened the feeble position of the English language in Independent Armenia by pushing English-language instruction beyond the confines of public schools and universities to private tutorship, language schools, and inter-organizational missions. The improving English-language proficiency in Armenia not only safeguarded the establishment of a strong bilingual school of translatorship and interpreting, but also began to gradually increase the number of English speakers in the country. Because of this, the relative proportion of English speakers in local conferential audiences is constantly increasing, altering the linguo-dynamics of the interpreted auditorium and changing the formal behavior of institutionalized audiences and the psychology of formal meetings. These shifts are fostering unique and unprecedented challenges for interpreters, often leading to problems that seem to require unified solutions and are worthy of the attention of the translatorial community. Thus, the objective of this research is to identify the level of multilingualism in Armenian audiences and to see how it affects the professional activity of interpreters. The paper also attempts to propose possible regulations that can be used to avoid such imbalances that can render the interpreter’s work redundant in certain settings.
Presenters
Gurgen KarapetyanSenior Lecturer, Department of Translation and Intercultural Communication, Brusov State University, Erevan, Armenia
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Communications and Linguistic Studies
KEYWORDS
Multilingualism, Interpreting, Imbalance, Superfluity
