To repair or not to repair? Repairs and risk taking in video remote interpreting.

The importance of video remote interpreting (VRI) for providing interpreting services has drastically increased over the last decade. Empirical research has shown, however, that interpreting through video link may have a significant impact on the interaction and the interpreting performance in dialogue interpreting contexts. The present study contributes to this growing field of research by focusing on interpreters' repair initiations in the context of VRI. Although repairs are an important mechanism for addressing problems in communication, very little research has been devoted to the study of interpreter-initiated repair in dialogue settings. Based on a corpus of video-recorded interpreted interactions (Dutch-Russian), where the interpreter is either present onsite or connected through video link, we analyse interpreters' repair initiations and related risk taking behaviour. More specifically, we examine how interpreters manage a specific type of repair initiations in video remote interpreting, namely postponed repairs. The analysis reveals differences in repair patterns between video remote and onsite interpreting and we propose that these differences result from differential risk management in the two settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]