NSF Award Abstract - #9812059

AWSFL008-DS3

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

Abstract

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.