Speaker
Description
As a challenging form of dialogue interpreting, talk show interpreting is primarily characterized by its culture-specificity, situationality, and interactiveness. Particularly within the context of popular culture of Türkiye, which has a very strong performative and oral tradition of humour, talk shows are likely to entertain through grotesquely stylized language, discourse, and mise-en-scene, most of which may be obscene in nature. As talk show hosts are usually male, their humour may be based on a misogynistic objectification of the female body of the guest –and in some cases, of the female interpreter. In such cases, the professional identity and dignity of the interpreter are violated leaving the interpreter antagonized by means of direct or indirect verbal or non-verbal interventions of the host, disguised as “humour”. Rather than such art of humour, the entertainment may rest on the normalization and legitimization of the male gaze through objectification of female stakeholders’ bodies. To add to the complexity of the interpreting task, the process may go beyond consecutive dialogue interpreting, the interpreter may be expected to perform whispered simultaneous interpreting, or voice-over simultanoeus interpreting (performed off-stage), all to be performed under the constraints mentioned above. Since entertainment is the priority, the host may be reluctant to lose the rhythm of his performance and directly interacts with the audience in their native language allocating little or no time and opportunity to the interpretation of the content thereby suppressing the voice of the objectified female guest and/or interpreter. With particular focus on selected episodes of Beyaz Show (1996-2018), a popular talk show hosted by Beyazıt Öztürk, this study uses the conceptual frameworks of various disciplines as it discusses and illustrates a case of double ethical crises in Türkiye, caused by the violation of ethics of humour and ethics of interpreting.
| Keywords | ethical crisis, talk show interpreting, interpreting ethics, ethics of humour, dialogue interpreting |
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| ergilbasak1@gmail.com |