The Linguist

@Linguist_CIOL FEBRUARY/MARCH The Linguist 23 SECTION HEADER REVIEWS linguistic choices made by those taking part in a conversation mediated by interpreters. She also shows how this affects the decisions taken by language professionals when rendering messages with social implications that go beyond words. Each chapter throws light on the value of the interpreters' cultural capital, and on their innate human ability to make appropriate choices for facilitating effective communication in view of cultural discrepancies. Based on interpreters' perspectives and real stories, the author prompts the reader to reflect on the strategies chosen. If non-intervention and impartiality are questioned in certain situations, what would be the most appropriate solution in an intercultural encounter? One example is the story of an interpreter who has to communicate news of an imminent death to a terminally ill Asian patient, as told by an Australian doctor. Since communicating a bad diagnosis is approached differently in Australia and Bangladesh, the interpreter needs to solve the dilemma of how to deal with the issue. Anecdotes such as this will keep you immersed from cover to cover. Cho includes reflection activities, which make the book an excellent resource for language students, interpreters and those on courses in intercultural communication, and could be used for group discussions. Some of the most engaging sections include 'In Search of Sympathetic Ears' (medical interpreting), 'Inclusion Efforts by Excluded Parents' (school interpreting), 'Bilingual Interpreters in Monolingual Courtrooms' (legal interpreting) and 'English Proficiency and Male Pride' (business interpreting). People in authority under an institutionalised structure may argue that the interpreter's role should be mechanic – i.e. to convey only what they hear – while Dr Cho emphasises that interpreting "is ultimately about the performance of social acts that are underpinned by universal human values". Her fascinating research provides a useful source for analysing speech perceptions and migrants' rationale within monolingual contexts. This book is a must-have for anyone who would like to take their cultural understanding and appreciation of power relations in communication to the next level. Jaquelina Guardamagna FCIL CL IAPTI Intercultural Communication in Interpreting Jinhyun Cho Routledge, 2021 164 pp; ISBN 9781138610613 Paperback, £32.99 What, wonders physicist-turned-linguist Sverker Johansson, were the first human words? When were they uttered? How has our species developed this capacity for seemingly limitless expression? The answers offered here are mostly not from the established domains in linguistics, but from anatomy, primatology and evolutionary science. In terms of biological characteristics, humans are one of the 300 species of primates – what you might call a huge family with many distant relatives. Chimpanzees, who we diverged from 5-10 million years ago, are our closest relatives and the species most able to use language. A female chimp, Washoe, adopted by US researchers in the 1960s, communicated successfully using around 350 gestures from American Sign Language and taught some to her adopted son. Following that, a male bonobo, Kanzi, learned to understand and respond to human requests on the telephone; he had the listening proficiency and vocabulary range of a two-year-old human. However, the pharynx and vocal apparatus in these and other primates have not adapted to enable speech. The human vocal tract has done so (the evolutionary cost of this is that we are more prone to choking). Chimps and gorillas seem to have latent language abilities which can be developed in a university laboratory, but not in their natural setting. How did we steal a march on our fellow primates? Firstly, our predecessors, Homo erectus, were bipedal. They came The Dawn of Language Sverker Johansson; Frank Perry (trans.) MacLehose Press, 2021 420 pp; ISBN 9781529411393 Hardback, £25 idiosyncratic ways, a common feature among isolated languages. This immense diversity of languages actually demonstrates the importance of politics, history and geography in the dissemination of languages in the first place and then whether or not they can survive. It would have been useful to have a chapter focusing on the way in which so many of the world's 6,000-7,000 languages are disappearing, and why it is important for projects such as the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme to track and record them while there is still time. In the meantime, this book provides a useful source of information about some of the least known languages from all over the world. It is a pity there is no index as it is not a book to be read from cover to cover, but it is very rewarding to dip into and deserves to be widely available as a work of reference. Professor Tim Connell HonFCIL The full title, Intercultural Communication in Interpreting: Power and choices, says it all. This book is a compilation of cultural situations faced by interpreters in the business, health, legal and education sectors in Australia, which resonates well with the situation in the UK and, perhaps, in other anglicised countries. Jinhyun Cho describes how a dominant language, gender, profession and setting have an influence on the behaviour and

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