POSMODERNIDAD: ¿FIN DE LA METAFÍSICA?

Before conducting interviews, various steps had to be undertaken. These are described in the following section.

3.1.1. Ethics approval and obtaining the participants’ informed consent Ethics approval was granted by the University of Salford’s Research Ethics Panel in January 2013 after submitting the College Ethics Panel – Ethical Approval Form for Post-Graduates.

A Participant Information Sheet for prospective participants was created. This detailed the study’s background (such as the study’s scope and aims), and it also gave some practical guidelines (such as the estimated duration of the interview, the choice of conducting the interview via Skype or in face-to-face mode). The research supervisors’ contact details were also included in case the prospective participants had any queries or complaints.

113 Seidman (2006) urges the researcher to draft a consent form, and he

recommends that it cover seven principles, which formed the basis for drafting this study’s Participant Consent Form. It explicitly stated that participants agreed to take part in the study, and that they did so of their own free will. They were also asked to confirm that they had had the opportunity to ask questions about the study, and that they were informed that they could withdraw at any time, without giving a reason. The Participant Consent Form also granted the participants confidentiality and anonymity. Furthermore, participants were asked to agree to the recording of the interview (on a digital voice recorder for face-to-face

interviews, or via the freeware Amolto Call Recorder for interviews conducted over Skype). If participants did not agree to this, the form stated that extensive notes would be taken during the interviews. Finally, participants were asked if they agreed to be contacted at a later stage in case further information was needed. All the participants agreed to the terms, and none declined to have the interview recorded. It is worth noting that Seidman (2006)’s seventh principle relating to interviewing children was not relevant, as all participants were expected to be over 18 years of age. Furthermore, the physical or mental risks that could be

encountered by the participants were deemed low. However, the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy’s contact details were always available to the researcher, and would have been given in case participants had shared a traumatic experience with the researcher.

All the Consent Forms were received in advance of the interviews taking place, apart from three. In such situations, the participants confirmed that they had received them, and that they were aware of their content. As these three Consent Forms were duly filled in and returned after the interviews had been conducted, the data were kept as part of the study corpus.

3.1.2. Finding the participants

Upon receiving the Ethics approval to carry out this study, three interpreters who were already known to the researcher were contacted to take part in a pilot study (discussed in 3.2.2). After reviewing and validating the list of interview questions, it was decided to disseminate the call for participation to prospective participants working as court interpreters in England. As the workings of one particular court

114 was not under scrutiny, no specific authorisation from formal gatekeepers (such as a court or NRPSI official) was required (Seidman, 2006). Furthermore, since there is no register detailing interpreters with experience in VCI, the call was sent

through various routes to practising court interpreters. The amount of information about the researcher and the research was limited, but still sufficient, in order to gain informed consent. This approach was used to ensure that participants would not restrict their understanding to a specific frame, and that they would not “slant what they say in the light of their interpretation of ‘who’ they think [the researchers] are and what they think the effect of the research will be” (Wengraf, 2001, p. 189). Various channels were used in order to find prospective participants. Some court interpreters known to the researcher were contacted directly, as were training centres for the DPSI (within Further and Higher Education) so that tutors could take part in and/or snowball the information to their former students. With regard to interpreters’ organisations, the Institute of Translation and Interpreting’s Chief Executive, the Chartered Institute of Linguists’ President, the Association of Police and Court Interpreters’ Chairman were all contacted to ask them to disseminate the call for participants (including the Participant Information Sheet and the Participant Consent Form) to their members. Often they did not manage the data base personally, but forwarded the dissemination request to another point of contact so that they could send all the relevant material to their members. Posters were also distributed in Manchester Magistrates’ and Crown Courts so that they could be pinned on notice boards. Furthermore, a blog was created so that participants could also download the material. The above approaches yielded a very limited number of interested participants. Therefore, Capita, a translation and interpreting company which provided court interpreters nationally, was contacted, but they declined to contact their interpreters. At this stage, it was decided to contact court interpreters directly by using the National Register of Public Service Interpreters. Access to the register is free, but it is restricted to the first fifty

interpreters per language combination. Although many languages did not have fifty interpreters nationally, some returned more interpreters than the researcher was allowed to contact (for instance, a search for Polish interpreters returned 264 entries, but it was possible to contact only the first fifty). In total, 1150 prospective participants were contacted by email.

115 Thirty-nine interpreters expressed an interest in taking part in the study. However, owing to time constraints, some participants then decided to withdraw from the study, and others never replied to invitations to schedule interviews. In the end, eighteen participants were interviewed (including three participants for the pilot study) between 13/11/2013 and 02/02/2015. This number was deemed sufficient when applying Seidman (2006)’s principles of sufficiency and saturation of

information49_{. Indeed, the sample was deemed representative of the interpreter’s} population as both genders and a wide range of languages, years of experience, experience in VCI, qualifications were represented in the interviews. Furthermore, by the time Participant 18 was interviewed, much of the information provided by then had already been discussed with previous participants.