Turn-taking Management Strategies Under The Guidance Of Time Psychological Approach In Telephone Interpreting

Telephone interpreting, as the name indicates, means interpretation provided through telephone. Compared with face-to-face interpreting, telephone interpreting boasts an obvious advantage in convenience, therefore is competitive in interpreting market. In practice, disordered turn-taking disturbs many telephone interpreters’ performance. Most studies concerning this problem discuss invisibility’s influence on interpreters, or interpreters’ roles and responsibilities in constructing conversations, while little research have probed into service users’ experience and psychology. This report uses psychological findings about waiting time perception to analyze turn-taking failure cases in the author’s own telephone interpreting tasks, explaining higher risk of turn-taking failures by linking invisibility, prolonged waiting time perception, and users’ worse experience. Besides, strategies are devised accordingly, which include adding fillers, adding certainty,changing service phase and shortening actual waiting time. Then the strategies were practiced and adjusted in later phases of the project, and a user’sdetailed feedbackwas also collected after the project byan interview to verify the effectiveness of the strategies.