The Impact of Consecutive Interpreting on Church ermons: A Study of English to Kamba Interpretation in Machakos town, Kenya

Abstract

This paper examines consecutive interpreting in Pentecostal church sermons. Interpreting is a major communication skill used in communication process in society. It is used in Pentecostal churches as a strategy to reach the entire congregation (audience) in a multilingual situation. Machakos town, in which the study is conducted, is a multilingual town in which the preachers use consecutive interpreting to reach the congregation. This study examined sermons preached in English and consecutively interpreted to Kamba. The study analysed the communication strategies in order to examine the impact of consecutive interpreting based on Tarone (1981), Faerch and Kasper (1983) communication strategies taxonomies. A descriptive research design was used to obtain information. Purposive sampling was used to select five churches that used consecutive interpreting, in which the sermons were preached in English and interpreted to Kamba. The audience who understood both English and Kamba were purposively selected and the interpreters from the sampled churches formed part of the sample. Data was collected through non-participant observation and interviews. Ten sermons were audio-taped from the sampled Pentecostal churches. Data from the audio tapes was transcribed word for word to create texts for analysis. The analysis used Tarone (1981) and Faerch and Kasper (1983) taxonomies to illustrate the communication strategies used by the interpreters in order to examine their impact on the interpreted text.