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Evie Garf  

Language in Use 

Dr. Christine Monikowski 

March 22, 2018  

Authorship/Ownership of Interpreted Form and Content 

I encountered a lot of new concepts in this class, but what I'm really excited about is 

synthesizing and crystallizing them in a new way. I want to take a few thinkers and make their 

concepts "hang together." Their work doesn't exist alone, they all have implications for one 

another. I want to start with general concepts about communication from Tannen and then pair 

them with ones more specific to this field from Metzger. I think the implications of one on the 

other impacts how I think about process models as well as the ever-present matter of power and 

control.  

Interpreters are the ones in an interaction who are holding the cards, the one constant on 

both sides of the communication. The interpreter has ultimate power to see the big picture. An 

interpreter has the power to manipulate. Manipulation can have ill intention, to manipulate for 

personal benefit or interest. But, manipulation of language is necessary and desired for dynamic 

equivalence, portraying and translating politeness strategies, meeting time requirements, etc. 

Some manipulation is expected, required even. Manipulation of the form is expected. 

Manipulation of the content is not.  

Primacy of Form  

One of the biggest concepts that I take from Tannen is the idea of the metamessage. That 

the words themselves, what is said literally (the content) is really only important as a vehicle for 

the metamessage (the form). ​How​ those words are said portrays something more than the words 

do. Words are flexible, and the exact same ones can mean many different things in different 
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contexts. Tannen also prioritizes the ​intentions​ of the speaker as paramount. With that assessment 

in mind, she espouses tools for the person who is "listening" to better understand what those 

intentions might be, instead of blaming the relationship or the speakers. In her own words, "[t]his 

book shows how much of this blame is misplaced. Bad feelings are often the result of 

misunderstandings that arise from differences in conversational style" (Preface). Tannen claims 

that often "the most effective repair" is done "not by talking about it directly but by speaking in a 

different way, exhibiting different assumptions, and hence triggering different responses in the 

person we're talking to. But the most important thing is to be aware that misunderstandings can 

arise...when no one is crazy and no one is mean and no one is intentionally dishonest." (Tannen 

27).  

Hoza touches on intentions at the beginning of his book: "...people tend to assume that 

their interpretation of another person's way of speaking is the correct interpretation, whether or 

not that interpretation was the person's intent or not" (Hoza 1). This excerpt made me think, 

which do we trust more? Which is more “real”? You could argue that intentions are paramount, 

and any one person’s impression could be a misinterpretation, per Tannen. So by that logic, we 

really should focus on the true intentions. On the other hand, no one really has access ever to 

anyone’s true intentions, and moreover, "good intentions" don't immunize against negative 

effects. So, what we really need to be paying attention to is how something comes across to other 

people, how it lands in their heads and makes an impression. This is an open question, and maybe 

one we don't need to answer so much as consider. 

For Tannen, the words are important only as a host for delivering the metamessage. 

"Very little of what is said is important for the information expressed in the words...it's 

metamessages that we react to most strongly...how we speak those words—how loud, how fast, 

with what intonation and emphasis...In other words, how we say what we say communicates 
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social meanings" (Tannen 29-30). She maintains that it's the metamessage that we really trust. 

The way we communicate with each other can be messy, but we don't have another hope but to 

encode our intended meanings in messages, which are further shrouded in metamessages. 

Conversational style is painted as a kind of structural issue that can get in the way. The 

importance of the form for making impressions can actually interfere with the content. 

Authorship of Form  

The idea for including authorship and ownership in this discussion came through this 

passage from Metzger:  

...​while the interpreter is authoring, not merely animating, her renditions, this is still 
qualitatively different from the authorship of the original utterer...one way to account 
for this difference would be...identifying a continuum of authorship based on a range 
of features such as ownership of content and form of an utterance (Metzger 179). 
 
This has to do with the notion of "co-constructing" meaning, that what a target audience 

receives is a message that is actually a collaborative effort between original speaker and 

interpreter. This reminds us that "...everyone within an interaction is part of the interaction" (21 

Roy), what I'm calling The Mantra. ​The idea of co-constructing meaning between an original 

speaker and an interpreter implies that "meaning" itself is not one indissoluble thing; the gestalt 

meaning comes apart to reveal that there is both a content of a message and also its requisite 

form. This leads us to understanding that different people can be responsible for these things.  

I see Metzger's work as being attentive to the realities of the ​impression​: regardless of the 

intentions of the speaker, the message might land one way or another in someone else's head. 

Here, I see the focus as more on the speaker's responsibility to anticipate and represent their 

intentions clearly for the listener, rather than on the listener to mine the message for possible 

differences in conversational style and how it might mesh with your own.  

Since Metzger is writing specifically about interpreting, it's not only the responsibility of 

the original utterer to author their content, but also the responsibility of the interpreter to author 
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the second utterance for a different audience. It really brings to light the point that 

metamessages—impressions—are constructed. When looking at interpreting, you can peel those 

things apart and see that each of those elements can be performed by different people. It also 

emphasizes to me what is meant by a "co-constructed" message.  

All Together Now 

From Metzger, we can see that on the continuum of authorship, the original speaker is 

responsible for the content, but it is the interpreter who is responsible for "authoring" the form, 

which is also the site of the metamessage​. ​If we then overlay that construction with Tannen's 

overarching tenet about the primary import of the metamessage for the meaning and social 

meaning, we can see the power implication.​ ​Tannen's main point is that many of our 

misunderstandings are "only skin deep." Don't worry, it's not the meat of what is being said, not 

the content where the problem is located—it's just the form! She emphasizes the dominant place 

that the form occupies, and even titles an entire section ​The Meaning Is the Metamessage.​ But it 

just so happens that this aspect of the co-constructed meaning is also the same one that 

interpreters have authorship over: the form.​ ​From Metzger, we see that ​that's precisely that piece 

that interpreters control​, and are expected to control.​ ​It is for this reason (among many others) 

that an interpreter usurps this power to get in between the content and its form and to make an 

impression. It'd be nice if the meaning could just be superimposed on the consumers' brains, 

without the messiness of form, but that's why an interpreter is there in the first place: because 

meaning needs to come through the double filter of a message, and therefore a metamessage.  

No matter what, interpreters are intercepting this power to form the metamessage and 

affect an impression (in addition to the power they have to ​control​ the actual interaction). An 

impression can be formed unconsciously, regardless of the speaker's own intentions, and even 

more so through an interpreter. 

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So do the consumers "own" the content and the interpreters "own" the form that together 

amount to the "full" meaning? That's one way to think about it. However, I want to acknowledge 

the "triadic" nature of an interpreted interaction, but in a slightly different way than what I take as 

Metzger's original point about it. "Interpreted encounters can be seen as...a triadic encounter that 

also includes the interpreter as a participant" (Metzger 176). If we already accept the purpose of 

the The Mantra to remind us not to forget the interpreter's significance in making meaning, I think 

we also need to re-remember something else. The phrase "co-construct" implies an assumed 

cooperation between original speaker and interpreter. But I want to say that the third party we 

need to remember in order to make the triad now isn't so much the interpreter, but the audience, 

whose impressions contribute to what you could call a tri-construction of meaning. Since The 

Mantra prompts us to see that ​everyone​ in the interaction is part of the interaction, it can also 

remind us to include in the whole of "the meaning" the resulting impression that is produced, how 

it lands in the audience's heads. ​Their​ impression constructs meaning too. O​nce someone makes a

statement, once it's interpreted, it's easy to think the work of communication is done. Meaning can

be thrown up, but if never pulled back down and received after the (however careful) launching of

the message, it is inert. In order for it to be used it must be fused with someone again.

Understanding needs to have both an ascent and a descent. In other words, the context, the

audience, also shapes the meaning. In this way, I can understand interpreted meaning as a

matryoshka doll: first the original speaker’s content, which is contained by the interpreter’s form,

which is all contained by the context of audience.  

 
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Works Cited 

Hoza, Jack. ​It's Not What You Sign, It's How You Sign It​. Gallaudet University Press, 2007.

Metzger, Melanie. ​Sign Language Interpreting: Deconstructing the Myth of Neutrality​. Gallaudet

University Press, 1999.

Roy, Cynthia B. ​Interpreting as a Discourse Process​. Oxford University Press, 2000.

Tannen, Deborah. ​That's Not What I Meant! How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks

Relationships​. Harper Collins, 1986.