Interpreting stance : epistemic modality markers in Polish-English consecutive interpreting

Abstract

Defined as “the ways the writers project themselves into their texts to communicate their integrity, credibility, involvement, and a relationship to their subject matter and their readers” (HYLAND, 1999: 101), stance can be expressed by a variety of means, including, among others, hedges, emphatics and attitude markers. Hyland sees stance as consisting of three main components: affect, relations and evidentiality. Affect concerns the extent to which personal attitudes towards what is said, including emotions and perspective, find their way into the text; relation reflects the interaction between the sender and the receiver, their involvement and their presence in the text; while evidentiality refers to “the writer’s expressed commitment to the truth of the propositions he or she presents, their reliability, strength and precision, or the strategic manipulation of these features for interpersonal goals” (HYLAND, 1999: 101)1. This paper is concerned with the last mentioned element, by CONRAD and BIBER (1999) called epistemic stance, which appears to be the most frequently marked stance component (CONRAD and BIBER, 1999; HUNSTON, 2007: 29) and whose exponents include (and go beyond) epistemic and evidential modal markers. The focus of this small-scale study is on those exponents of stance by which speakers express their assessment of the truth of a proposition and the treatment they receive in Polish-English consecutive interpreting. The first two sections address the notion of epistemic modality and its markers in English and in Polish. Further sections present the results of an analysis of trainee interpreters’ performance in a task involving an academic text of over 800 words in a consecutive mode from Polish into English, with a focus on the treatment of epistemic modal markers present in the source language text (ST).