ABSTRACT
Healthcare interpreting is a frequent type of dialogue interpreting, that consists of triadic exchanges between a healthcare provider, a patient and an interpreter. They all collaborate to ensure efficient interaction by means of specific temporal and sequential placement of their multimodal actions. However, the use of telephone and video link puts constraints on the ways in which participants can synchronize their actions multimodally and thus impacts on the ways in which grounding is achieved, a crucial element in participants’ collaboration. This chapter investigates how participants synchronize their actions in video remote interpreting and telephone interpreting, compared with face-to-face interpreting, by the micro-analysis of nine simulated, video-recorded doctor–patient consultations. In both remote interpreting configurations, the cost of grounding appears to be higher than in face-to-face interpreting and linked to the participants’ unawareness of the dependence of their grounding techniques on the specific configurations.
