Interpreters' Role In Politically Sensitive Settings

Interpreters' working settings exert a powerful influence on their behaviours in practice, as well as their beliefs about their roles (Angelelli 2004:83). Politically sensitive settings, a special genre of social communicative event, possesses its own distinct features.Even though interpreters are indispensable for ensuring the successful conduct of this type of event (Sun 2014:7), interpreters' specific role in politically sensitive settings has so far received very limited scholarly attention.Drawing on Erving Goffman's social communicative theory (1956,1981) as a theoretical base, this study attempts to explore interpreters' negotiation of their role in politically sensitive settings such as the Chinese Premier Press Conferences through the shifts they make, with particular reference to participation framework and footing. The analytic tool of shifts is used to conduct analysis of the parallel corpus of the on-site interpretation of 5 Chinese PremierPress Conferences (1998-2002).Through the analysis, five types of shifts are identified, including Addition, Reduction, Correction and Mitigation that indicate interpreters' assumption of the author role and Type P shifts that refers to interpreters' adoption of the principal role. With qualitative analysis of every type of shifts in the corpus and quantitative statistics of the occurrences of shifts, the study reveals that in addition to their traditional animator role, interpreters actively assume the author and principal roles. Through employing shifts of omission and mitigation to mitigate the pressure posed to their principal of service, interpreters signal their alignment with the institution. Interpreters in such context also take advantage of their 'non-person' status to facilitate the communication. The study also identifies the interpreting strategies of Addition to be the most preferred strategy for interpreters in such context. These findings support the perception increasingly demonstrated by recent studies that interpreters are not mere 'conduit' of messages, but are engaged with other interlocutors in the co-construction of a communicative event (Angelelli 2004:84).