There’s an old episode of The Simpsons, in which Homer gifts his wife, Marge, a bowling ball. The gift is pretty transparently what Homer wants, not at all what his wife wants. That is a pretty low blow. Trying to give someone a gift so you will feel good or worse, simply so they will give it back to you, is an act of pure selfishness. Yet, we can sometimes find ourselves stumbling into producing interpreting and multilingual church that is more about us than others. It helps to remember to ask ourselves “who is this for?”
Designing an Audience
Whenever we speak or sign, we do it with a person and a purpose in mind. The words I use in a quick WhatsApp to my wife to tell her that I am trying to get the baby asleep on her own bed are very different to the ones I use in her Valentine’s cards. Likewise, the words I use with my children are different to the ones I use in these newsletters.
The fancy academic word for this is “audience design”[i]. Whenever you speak or sign, you do it with an audience in mind. The first priority is the person or people you are directly speaking to. You expect them to be there and address them directly. They are called “addressees”. Next comes the people who you know are there and who you acknowledge, even if you aren’t speaking to them directly. Those are “auditors”. Then there are the people who you are aware of but don’t acknowledge. These are “overhearers”. Finally, there might be some folks who hear but you don’t even know they exist. These are “eavesdroppers”.
Addressees, auditors, overhearers, and eavesdroppers make up the entirety of your audience. The amount of attention you pay to each reduces as you go along that line.
Or at least, that’s how it should go. It is remarkably simple to forget about a group or to just assume that some people will manage. What does that look like? Let me tell you a story.
What even is that anyway?
I was once asked to review abstracts for a conference. People send in 300 word summaries of the talk they would like to give and the abstract review team scores the abstracts. Those scores then determine whether someone will get a slot to speak. Simple, right?
Or it should be simple. To make the whole thing fair, the abstracts are anonymised by removing people’s names and university details. Also, the abstract team tends to be made up of people with a wide variety of specialisms within a single discipline, especially in the cases of conferences like the one I was asked to help with.
While that reality was made clear and the conference was general enough that people should have known, it seems that word didn’t get to around everyone who submitted. About a third of all the abstracts I reviewed could be rejected on the spot due to either having nothing at all to do with the entire academic discipline of the conference or being written so poorly that it was hard to tell what they were even about.
The crunch came for those in the middle. About another 40% of abstracts were borderline. What tipped them towards a higher or lower score was simple: could I understand them fully? Sure, the jargon might have been clear for an expert in 17th century Javanese poetry translation in Southern France but it had to make sense to a non-specialist. Audience design, and specifically, the ability to make the idea clear for a smart person who wasn’t a specialist, was the single deciding factor. If I didn’t know what the person was talking about, I gave it a low score.
Designing for your audience
The next two posts will go into some things to think about when we apply this concept to interpreting and multilingual church. Right now, I want to switch the normal order and think through some of the practicalities of audience design.
First off, if we are going to design for an audience, we need to know who that audience is. That might sound basic but it really does matter. Spending time thinking and learning about the people in your community, or the people at the conference or event, will multiply your ability to serve well and interpret well.
Learn to ask questions about the people you are working with and learn to ask them questions. Later, you will see a survey, precisely so I can do that here.
What does listening to your audience look like in your work? Who is in your audience and what are they looking for?
A second part of designing for an audience is to learn to speak like them. This means learning their language, their terminology and their phrases. It also means learning their concerns, hopes, dreams, and desires. Pitching your communication to an audience is much easier once you have spent time listening to how they already speak.
Finally, audience design is never final. It means putting in the time to try, try, and try again to use the right words, phrases, and signs, to create the right environment and to work continually at integrating feedback from your audience into your work. People are never static. Our ways of interpreting and of doing multilingual church cannot be static either.
[i] A. Bell, ‘Language Style as Audience Design’, Language in Society 13, no. 2 (1984): 145–204.
I can’t understand this sentence : Yet, we can sometimes find ourselves stumbling into producing interpreting and multilingual church that is more about us than others.