“Speech Action Patterns” and “Discourse Types”

Starting with the problem of finding an appropriate tertium comparationis for the contrastive study of linguistic actions in the source language and the target language, which is crucial for the analysis of translated texts and interpreted discourse, the following article deals with some theoretical and methodological issues concerning the concepts of ‘speech action patterns’ and ‘discourse types’ by briefly considering their parallels and differences to the concept of ‘genre’. In the second part of the article, I will try to show the outcome of the practical usage of these concepts in the analysis of multilingual institutional communication. Beginning with some relevant characteristics of interpreted ‘briefings for informed consent’, as determined by previous analyses within the project “Dolmetschen im Krankenhaus”, I will discuss the interplay between different speech action patterns which are supposed to establish this discourse type. I will illustrate the discussion with transcriptions of monolingual and interpreted ‘briefings for informed consent’, in which patients in a hospital are informed about possible complications or risks of a planned medical procedure.