This is a preprint version of a chapter appearing in Translationswissenschaft und ihre Zusammenhänge 6: Dolmetschen. Interpreting., Publisher: Praesens Verlag, Editors: Zuzana Bohušová, Mira Kadrić, pp.156-168. The book, which contains the full and final version, is available for purchase here: http://www.praesens.at/praesens2013/?p=5157. Published with permission of the editors. Encouraging Dialogue with and between Interpreting Stakeholders: The Role of Blogging Abstract As much as Interpreting Studies was born within the emerging profession of conference interpreting, the prevailing paradigm has been for researchers to conceive, design, run and interpret their research without explicit engagement with other practitioners. Work by Turner and Harrington (2000), however, has suggested that it is advisable to involve community members and practitioners throughout the research process. In their view, sharing power over the research process can lead to more mutually beneficial work by encouraging dialogue about projects while they are still ongoing. This paper will show how such dialogue can be encouraged with the use of blogs. Two blogs, targeting different but overlapping stakeholder groups will be analysed, given the close relationship between their overall aims and their contrasting results. The first blog, BSL:UPTAKE, was created as a partnership project between Heriot-Watt University, the University of Edinburgh, Queen Margaret University, the Scottish Funding Council, and stakeholders within the Deaf and signing communities in Scotland. The blog aimed to increase engagement in politics and research among the British Sign Language users in Scotland, including British Sign Language-English interpreters. The blog consisted of bilingual (English/British Sign Language) video posts, alongside space for discussion. The second blog, LifeinLINCS, is the blog of the Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies and HeriotWatt University and aims to increase engagement with research among stakeholders in all language industries including translation, interpreting and language policy. The posts on this blog are overwhelmingly in the form of English text posts. Data on site visits and conversations taking place on these two blogs demonstrate that an appetite exists among interpreting stakeholders for discussing and cooperating on research projects and that specific strategies are needed to exploit this appetite. This paper will also show, however, that the initial price for any cooperation between researchers and other stakeholders must be paid by researchers. For stakeholders to see the value in a project and choose to invest time and effort in it, it is the academics who must first engage in a process of translating their research into a form that is meaningful for those outside of the academic arena. Introduction The field of Interpreting Studies traces its roots to the activities of early practitioners, whose research and professional activities were inseparable. While professional interpreters continue to be very active in Interpreting Studies, the link between the research and professional communities is not as close as it once was and the prevailing research paradigm is for researchers to conceive, design, run and analyse their studies without any input from outside stakeholders. This paper presents two separate but linked attemps to reverse this trend, encouraging interpreting stakeholders to engage with research via blogs. The results of these projects will be presented and discussed, alongside recommendations for best practice in the use of social media as a research engagement tool. Interpreting Studies and the Question of Power While Interpreting Studies would not be named as such until the 1990s, much of its early history can be traced to work of pioneering scholars such as Danica Seleskovitch (1968; 1975), whose research developed out of her practice as an early professional conference interpreter. With the professionalisation of conference interpreting came the need for formalised training and the work of such scholars aimed to provide the necessary frameworks for this training to take place. Hence the resear h of these pra ti-sear hers (Gile 1995, p.23) was intimately linked with the perceived needs of the profession. As Interpreting Studies sought to grow as an academic field, it grew away from the immediate concerns of practicing interpreters. With the rise in experimental studies that sought to understand how interpreters did their work (Pöchhacker 2004, pp.32–36) and the de-emphasis of subjective theorisation came an implicit, and sometimes explicit (Shlesinger 1994, p.126) view that researchers had a better understanding of their field of study than those whose lives were spent outside of the ivory tower. Work on client s expectations of conference interpreters is a prime example of this phenomenon. Here, the typical model has been for researchers to decide on the quality criteria they are interested in and then ask respondents to rate how important these are rather than asking respondents to suggest their own criteria (see Downie forthcoming). While exceptions to this general rule do exist (e.g. Meak 1990), there is still scant evidence of interpreting clients being involved in expectations research as anything other than respondents to interviews or surveys. Turner and Harrington, however, have argued that it is only by working closely with stakeholders over the life of a research project that academics can ensure that their research is of relevance to them (2000, p.263). This view is supported by Evans et al, who argue that 'mutually beneficial engagement involves both academic and non-academic community partners not just learning about, but also learning from, one another as they jointly tackle a research problem' (2012, p.1056). This represents a shift from both the practi-searcher paradigm and the researcher-centred approaches as it involves widening participation in research to those who have no prior direct contact with academia. Engagement in this approach gives outside stakeholders an opportunity to take a degree of ownership of research projects from an early stage. Still, the largely face-to-face methods proposed in the work of Turner and Harrington (2000) and Evans et al (2012) can only grant direct participation rights to a limited number of people. It would be unworkable to meet face-to-face with an entire professional community, let alone their clients. Even in ideal cases then, face-to-face methods can only ever increase individual or community engagement with research (Foster 1996; Turner & Alker 2003, p.55; Evans et al. 2012, pp.1061–1062), leading to important but still small gains in stakeholder engagement in the research process and outcomes. There is therefore a need for a means of encouraging and managing communication between researchers and outside stakeholders in a way that is suitable for larger groups. In two separate projects, the Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies at HeriotWatt University has attempted to use social media to create spaces for communication between academics and wider linguistic and professional communities.. Both of these projects are based on the principles and potential of social media, which will be outlined briefly below. Social Media The ter so ial edia e o passes a ra ge of te h ologies that are uilt o the technological and ideological changes that took place with the dawn of web 2.0 (Kaplan & Haenlein 2010, p.61). Whereas previously, under the paradigm of web 1.0, web pages were mostly static and only open to change by the relatively small number of users who controlled them, in web 2.0, users move from being passive consumers of information to becoming critics, collators and even creators of information, building on, reusing and even deleting the contributions of other users (Forte et al. 2009, pp.49–50). Parts of the World Wide Web have therefore become interactive and collaborative workspaces, with social media enabling this change. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter and blogging platforms such as Wordpress and Blogger have become foci for the ideological shift that accompanies the technological shift inherent in web 2.0. Hand and Ching (2011), for example, explored the use of Facebook pages by a local authorities to attempt to increase public participation in the local democratic process. Similarly Downie and Turner (forthcoming), Young and Temple (2014), Valentine and Skelton (2008) and Valentine et al (2006) have examined the use of social media to increase participation of the Deaf and Signing community in hearing society. In each of these cases, social media became tools for a shift in the relationship between power structures, such as governments and universities, and the wider societies in which they are embedded. All of these studies have argued that the success of social media as engagement tools depends on how they are used. Hand and Ching (2011, pp.377, 379), for example argue that he lo al authorities took the positio of speaking-from-po er , respo se rates ere much lower than when they engaged in informal discourse. In the work of Valentine and Skelton (2008, p.480; 2009, p.56), social media led to only a limited increase in communication between Deaf and Hearing communities as Deaf people preferred to use it to extend their social networks to Deaf people in other countries, rather than to broker new Deaf/Hearing connections. Social media therefore do seem to have potential as research engagement tools, dependent on the strategies used. The following two sections will therefore present two projects, BSL:UPTAKE and LifeinLINCS, which aimed to use blogging to increase research engagement, with contrasting results. The following accounts aim to explain the reasons for these differences and the lessons that can be learned for similar work in the future. BSL:UPTAKE – Background and Project Description For the 65,000 people in United Kingdom who self-identify as Deaf1 and use British Sign Language (BSL) (Turner & Harrington 2000, p.255), access to research is problematic as the normative methods for disseminating and discussing research are by the publication of written academic articles and reports and attending socially approved conferences and (Hyland 2004, pp.7–10). One area that is of particular importance in this case is the normative manner of discussing research once it is published. Beside short question and answer sessions at conference, such discussion takes place on the pages to the self-same journals where the research was published (Turner & Alker 2003, p.54). While such journals are theoretically open to Deaf people, the reality is that the general Deaf population is unlikely to engage in this way since the median deaf student will finish school with a reading age of 9 (Conrad 1979, p.154; Powers et al. 1998; Grushkin 1998, p.179). It is little wonder then that Deaf people seem disillusioned with academic research, experiencing what Valenti e a d “kelto ha e la elled resear h fatigue (2009, p.46), as they have little control over the progress of research and little to no access to its results. To address this, academics within the Deaf Studies section of the Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies at Heriot-Watt University, in partnership with academics from the University of Edinburgh and Queen Margaret University, the Scottish Funding Council and stakeholders within the Deaf and signing community launched BSL:UPTAKE, a bilingual, British Sign Language-English blog aimed at the Signing community. This community includes both deaf and hearing people who have knowledge of British Sign Language (hereafter B“L ). This e te ds the pote tial rea h a d i pa t of the log, gi e that 'it has been estimated that for every deaf person who uses BSL, there are nine hearing people with some knowledge of the language' (Woll & Adam 2012, p.111). The content of the blog consisted of videos, herein called 'posts,' in BSL, with English transcriptions. Posts appeared on such diverse topics as Deaf people's access to education (http://www.bsluptake.org.uk/?p=3), Deaf community involvement in town planning processes (http://www.bsluptake.org.uk/?p=77) and summaries of the work of researchers in Deaf Studies. National Deaf organisations also submitted accounts of their work, including a ten minute video annual report of the work of one such organisation. The first post appeared on 24th July, 2009, with the last appearing on 2 nd November, 2011, a total project length of 831 days, or 2 years, 3 months and nine days. Posts appeared at irregular intervals throughout this time, with 41 posts once appearing over a 3 day period, with other extended periods of with no posts at all. LifeinLINCS – Background and Description LifeinLINCS began as a staff project, when it was suggested that operating a blog could publicise the activities of the Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies (LINCS) at Heriot-Watt University in an engaging way. Blogging was chosen as a means of publicity and engagement given the success of similar projects in other UK universities. The difference with LifeinLINCS was that, rather than primarily targeting researchers, the blog would aim to for a much wider audience of non-academic stakeholders, especially stakeholders in translation, interpreting and language policy. The first post appeared on 1st October, 2011 and LifeinLINCS remains active to the present day (edited by Dr Katerina Strani). Posts have mostly been regular, with most weeks seeing a single post. Occasionally weeks with no posts occur, usually during holiday seasons, and on other occasions two posts appear in the same week, engaging with current events or presenting special announcements. Methods As the two sites are hosted on different platforms, the decision has been taken in this paper to draw only on statistics that are available for both blogs, with the aim of answering three key questions. These are as follows: 1) What evidence is there for engagement on each site? Given the emphasis in the literature on engagement as dialogue (rather than mere viewing), the main measure of engagement here will be the number of comments left on the site. Comments from the contributors and editors of the blogs must be noted separately. These are given as separate figures, after the number of total comments. A second, less direct, form of engagement occurs when users view several pages of the same site. Both platforms offer automated counting of the number of unique users and the number of page views over a given period. These statistics must be interpreted with care as visiting a high number of pages could either be an indicator of genuine interest or of a (potentially frustrating) search for a particular piece of information. While these statistics are available for whole days, weeks or months, WordPress only provides daily statistics for the immediately previous month and weekly statistics for the previous 30 weeks. For longer term results, less affected by seasonal changes, monthly statistics, which run back to the beginning of the blog, are more useful. This paper therefore presents figures from the monthly statistics. 2) How is engagement spread throughout the site? This question seeks to explore the extent to which engagement is common throughout the blog or concentrated on a few posts. If comments tend to be concentrated on one or two posts, this would suggest that only certain subjects are of interest. Conversely, if many posts only have a few comments each, this could mean that engagement remains at a superficial level, with no real dialogue taking place. Ideally, a high number of posts should show evidence of conversation. 3) What can be discovered about the nature of participants' engagement with the site? In this paper, engagement is seen as multi-faceted. The most obvious examples of engagement occur when a user posts a comment that elicits a reply from another user or a contributor or editor of the blog and a conversation then ensues. A second example of engagement occurs when a user posts to show their approval of the content of a post or to express gratitude to its author. Such cases are treated as representing the beginning of dialogue in this paper but need to be treated cautiously as such comments can sometimes be left as a subtle means of attracting traffic to other websites. While every possible precaution has ee take to eli i ate su h spa o e ts fro this stud , it is possi le that some have slipped through. A third example of engagement involves users linking to posts on the blog from their own website. These links are tracked and, in the case of LifeinLINCS appear in the comments pi g a ks . While su h a pra ti e has e isted for so e ti e, pi g a ks ere ot tra ked on BSL:UPTAKE during its lifetime. For this reason, pingbacks are included as part of the LifeinLINCS comments only. What is important here is not the activities in themselves, but what their relative presence can show about engagement on the blog. This paper will not attempt to provide a statistical mapping of each but will instead examine the extent to which each occur of each across the top three research posts on each website to provide qualitative insights into the kinds of engagement that are seen in these best cases. These posts will be interpreted in the context of the data presented in previous sections. Results This section will follow the same structure as the methods section, first looking at evidence for engagement, followed by the spread of engagement and finally the nature of engagement. ● Evidence for Engagement Over the lifetime of BSL:UPTAKE, 12 comments were left, of which 11 came from people who were not part of the project team. This equates to around 0.013 comments per day. Over the lifetime of LifeinLINCS until 1st November, 2014, 297 comments were left. Excluding the 57 comments left by the project team, leaves 240 comments, which equates to around 0.213 per day. Even taking into account the longer lifetime of LifeinLINCS, the site has averaged more than sixteen times more comments per day than BSL:UPTAKE. Statistics on user behaviour paint a very different picture. Given the different lifetimes of the two blogs and technical limitations with the statistics from BSL:UPTAKE, the statistics given here are for the last complete year for which statistics are available. For BSL:UPTAKE, this period was 1st June 2010 to 31st May, 2011 and represent every complete month for which statistics are available. For LifeinLINCS, this period was 1st November, 2013 to 31st October 2014. These periods were chosen as it was expected that the blogs would see more consistent numbers of page views and users as time went on. The following table presents a summary of user behaviour on each site during these periods. Page views per user Site Maximum BSL:UPTAKE 6.350 LifeinLINCS 1.881 Minimum Median 2.922 1.411 4.106 1.526 Standard Deviation 0.850 0.134 Table 1. Pageviews per user of BSL:UPTAKE and LifeinLINCS over a 20-month period. The table above shows that BSL:UPTAKE users visited more pages on the blog than those who visited LifeinLINCS. The maximum number of page views per user for LifeinLINCS is lower than the minimum such number for BSL:UPTAKE. LifeinLINCS users also seem to be more consistent in their behaviour, given the much lower standard deviation compared to BSL:UPTAKE. Users of BSL:UPTAKE therefore seemed to navigate widely around the site but leave little visible trace, while LifeinLINCS users tended to navigate much less but engage more deeply with specific items of content. ● How is engagement spread throughout the site? Here again, the two blogs differ. On BSL:UPTAKE, the 11 comments are spread over nine of the total 148 posts. Comments were therefore found on around 6.1% of posts. On LifeinLINCS, the total 297 comments were spread over 73 posts. Comments were therefore found on 24.5% of posts. Comments were therefore fewer and less widely spread on BSL:UPTAKE than on LifeinLINCS. In both cases, however, engagement does seem to be limited to a minority of posts. Even on LifeinLINCS, only one in four posts received any comments. Taking into account only those posts that did receive comments, the mean number of comments per post is also of interest. On BSL:UPTAKE, the mean number of comments per post (for posts that did receive any comments) was 1.222. Thus, when posts received comments at all, these tended to be few in number – certainly not enough for a conversation. For LifeinLINCS, this figure was 4.07, suggesting that, when posts did receive comments, these were more likely to form conversations. Further evidence for this hypothesis is found in the next sub-section. ● Nature of engagement BSL:UPTAKE and LifeinLINCS show very different kinds of engagement. On BSL:UPTAKE, the three posts with more than one comment include one post where a member of the team thanked a commenter, one post where a user double-posted an identical comment and one where two separate users posted their thanks 2. There is no evidence of dialogue on the site. On LifeinLINCS, there is much more evidence of dialogue. The most commented research post “ig language research: Deaf-heari g i ol e e t a d resear h ethi s Je i a Napier (http://lifeinlincs.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/sign-language-research-deaf-hearinginvolvement-and-research-ethics/) received 26 comments, of which 3 were pingbacks. There is ample evidence of conversation on this post with the majority of comments being to previous comments in one way or another. The se o d ost o e ted resear h post Broke Britai : Bla e the I terpreters? Graham Turner (http://lifeinlincs.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/broken-britain-blame-theinterpreters/) attracted 18 comments, of which one was a pingback. Replies to previous comments are much less common here, with only three comments making direct reference to previous ones. The third ost o e ted resear h post Vo of “ile e: O e eek later Graha Turner (http://lifeinlincs.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/vow-of-silence-one-week-later/) attracted 16 comments, of which three were pingbacks and six came from the original author in response to comments made by visitors. This last post should be read in context of its role as the summary of a week of daily posts by the author on his decision to only use BSL for one week as an expression of solidarity with the Deaf community in the UK. Responses to this campaign were spread throughout the entire week and on another blog where the author also posted. In this case, it is therefore appropriate to use the number of comments across the whole series as an indicator of engagement. The resulting figures are as follows: 47 comments, of which 10 were made by the author or another member of the LifeinLINCS team and 5 were pingbacks. Given that only 3 comments were expressions of thanks with ample examples of conversations between stakeholders and the author across both websites, this campaign demonstrates the highest level of engagement so far. Discussion The data from these blogs suggest that engagement using social media is a complex phenomenon. While BSL:UPTAKE seems to have been successful in encouraging users to navigate around the blog, such behaviour did not lead to any dialogue. Users of LifeinLINCS, on the other hand, navigated much less around the site but engage in much more visible dialogue. There are several possible reasons for these trends. The first reasons are technological. As internet connection speeds have risen and hardware has become more powerful and less costly, it has become easier to post multimedia comments. Such changes are no doubt facilitating easier dialogue in visual spatial languages such as BSL. It could be therefore that the state of technology at the time BSL:UPTAKE was launched on 24th July, 2009, mitigated against comments by outside stakeholders in the language they were most comfortable using. As comments on LifeinLINCS continue to be entirely in written English, it would seem that there is still much to do in encouraging multimedia interaction. In addition, familiarity with social media has grown in the time since the last post appearing on BSL:UPTAKE. It is likely therefore that users are more comfortable engaging with academia and research via social media than they would have been at an earlier stage in their development. The second possible reason is operational. Posts on LifeinLINCS are far more evenly spaced across the days and weeks than those on BSL:UPTAKE, leading to greater predictability. Visitors may then be assured that, even if a particular post is not of interest, more content will appear soon. User behaviour would indeed suggest that LifeinLINCS users are more direct in their navigation, viewing one or two posta and then choosing whether to engage with them or leave the site. It may be that users of BSL:UPTAKE found it necessary to navigate further precisely because content tended to be posted sporadically. The third possible reason is that users may simply have found the content on LifeinLINCS more worthy of engagement. Audience design may be a factor here. BSL:UPTAKE was aimed at a much more limited audience than LifeinLINCS, targeting only those who use or are stakeholders in the use of BSL. The audience for LifeinLINCS, meanwhile, may include anyone anywhere in the world with an interest in language. Authorship may also have played a part. Posts on LifeinLINCS are created by staff members and PhD students, while BSL:UPTAKE turned to the services of two project officers who did not have an academic track record. The media in which the posts appear and post length all may also have played a part, as too may growth in the use of social media between the two time periods. There may be no single reason why LifeinLINCS shows more overt signs of engagement than BSL:UPTAKE, even for posts that seem to target similar audience groups. Nevertheless, the continued success of LifeinLINCS does suggest that regular posting, and appreciation of the potential and limitations of existing technology, may be helpful for future research engagement efforts using social media. Conclusion This paper has sought to explore the use of social media to encourage research engagement. Key to this has been viewing dialogue between researchers and other stakeholders as core to engagement. With this in mind, the results of two engagementoriented blogs were discussed. While there is no single reason why one, LifeinLINCS, should have much more engagement than the other, BSL:UPTAKE, it was suggested that operational considerations (such as post frequency and audience design) and technological considerations (such as increasing use of social media) were contributing factors. These do not explain, however, why users of BSL:UPTAKE should visit more pages than those of LifeinLINCS, while commenting less. Those using social media to increase engagement will therefore need to plan for consistent levels of involvement while taking into account shifting patterns in how different social media platforms are used. 1 For the purposes of this article, the term 'deaf' will be used to refer to those who are clinically deaf. 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