Site under construction – Watch your step!
Situated Dialogues is both an ongoing action-research project and a collection of dialogues deliberately designed for the learning of dialogue interpreting skills. The growing collection results from iterative rounds of an ongoing action-research project and from collaborative efforts that span across professional realms.
Dialogue interpreting (facilitating communication with accuracy and transparency when there’s a language barrier) is a professional activity with different areas of specialization, including business settings or supranational institutions. It is also the star mode of interpreting in all the fields of public service and community interpreting (healthcare, social services, police, the justice system, asylum and refugee services, education, etc). A collection of practice and teaching materials that is suitable for the wide range of situations in which this mode of interpreting occurs ideally includes dialogues that are both relevant by topic and credible in their form. To respond to this double need (topic relevance and credible form) in myriad settings, we use an innovative approach (the D-A-L Method) to generate open access materials that cover topics in a wide range of contexts.
For the 2024-2025 cycle of the project, new Situated Dialogues were recorded in collaboration under two different frameworks: (1) the high fidelity simulation labs at the UAB’s school of medicine, (2) a research stay at Aichi Prefectural University, in Japan. Throughout 2025-2026, editing, derivation and subtitling of such recordings is under way. In previous rounds this project, initiated in 2018 by Dr. Garcia-Beyaert started, has received competitive funding from Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona and from the European Commission (SCIC – Directorate-General for Interpretation), as well as financial support from the Catalan Government (AGAUR, Generalitat de Catalunya) through the publicly funded research group MIRAS.
While this site is under construction and the searchable repository of dialogues is being built, many of the existing practice materials (logocentric) can be found under the UAB’s database. Please follow this link. Some of the (multimodal) discussion materials are progressively being uploaded to this Youtube channel.
For questions or suggestions, Dr. Garcia-Beyaert can be reached at sofia.garcia.beyaert@uab.cat.
Conferences and publications
[under construction]
García-Beyaert, Sofía. (2023). Accuracy and Beyond: Situated Dialogues for Strong Message Transfer Practice in Interactional Interpreting. The Interpreters’ Newsletter. (28), 111-130. doi: 10.13137/2421-714X/35553