Transducing a Sermon, Inducing Conversion

Abstract

This paper is an analysis of the final sermon of Billy Graham’s 1973 Crusade in Seoul, South Korea, when he preached to a crowd estimated to exceed one million people. Next to Graham at the pulpit was Billy Jang Hwan Kim, a preacher who, in his capacity as interpreter, translated Graham’s sermon verbally and peri-verbally—utterance by utterance, tone by tone, gesture by gesture—for the Korean-speaking audience. I examine the dynamic pragmatics (for example, chronotopic formulations, deictic calibrations, voicing and register effects, and indexical dimensions of entextualization) by which a sermonic copy across linguistic codes became an evangelical conduit between Cold War polities. In so doing, I demonstrate how the scope of intertextual analysis can be expanded productively from the narrow translation of denotation across codes to the broader indexical processes of semiotic “transduction” across domains of cultural semiosis.

The Invisible Labor and Ethics of Interpreting

“…In high-stakes human rights missions, some officers work with the same interpreter long enough that they claim to calibrate the tempo of speech, gestures, and intonation so that the interpreter's voice appears to merge with that of the officer, as if they inhabit a single body (Kunreuther 2020, p. 304). Harkness (2017) similarly demonstrates how Reverend Billy Graham's celebrated interpreter, Billy Kim, mimics the Reverend's gestures, intonation, and force of expression to "become one" with Graham and the "voice of God" simultaneously (p. 113). Future ethnographies about interpreters would benefit by drawing out the sonic dimensions of interpreting labor, as interpreters negotiate being perceived and experiencing themselves as both earwitnesses and conduits of voice (Kunreuther 2020), to make a robust contribution to doing anthropology in sound (Feld & Brenneis 2004).…”

“…Like other forms of reported or vicarious speech, interpretation is never simply a repetition (Gal 2015, Inoue 2018). Many scholars therefore view the interpreted message as a form of "transduction" (Harkness 2017, Silverstein 2003 or "radical translation" (Mannheim 2015, Povinelli 2001, noting that inevitable changes must occur to effectively communicate across cultural and political contexts.…”

“…Interpreters enable the movement of voices far from individual speakers to become material for written documents such as those produced for legal or asylum cases, human rights reports, medical files, evidence in international criminal trials, or even ethnographies (Doughty 2016, Smith-Khan 2017. Alternately, texts themselves may also be integral to the interpreting context, such as the Bible in church settings (e.g., Friedner 2018, Harkness 2017, Schieffelin 2007, Vigoroux 2010. In other settings, texts are produced as an alternative to oral interpretation, as Collins demonstrates in a Dutch medical clinic that developed a multilingual health manual, which ironically became a "self-defeating instrument," Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org.…”

A critical review of church interpreting research

“…While the concept of "emotional labour" is complex, what matters most for the purposes of this article is that such a characterisation of church interpreting is very similar to the one discussed in the autoethnographical research of Hokkanen (2016Hokkanen ( , 2017bHokkanen & Koskinen, 2016) and provides further evidence to support the assertions regarding the importance of the interpreter as a co-preacher found in the work of Karlik (2010), Vigouroux (2010), and Downie (2014). To this should also be added the historical research by Harkness (2017), who examined the semiotic strategies used by Billy Jang Hwan Kim in his interpreting of American evangelist Billy Graham to the effect that watching preachers felt as if the two worked together harmoniously and seemed to preach as one. This is a very clear confirmation of the single performance hypothesis.…”