The Role Of Community Telephone Interpreters

Unprecedented transformation has occurred in interpreting industry,since most on-sight interpreting are enforced to go remotely under the global crisis of COVID-19 in 2020.Language Line Solutions,one of the largest interpreting companies across the world,has launched “Covid-19 Support” to curb the pandemic in the US community.Shanghai International University,together with Shanghai Municipal Foreign Affairs Office(hereafter,“Shanghai MFOA”),has established the COVID-19 telephone interpreting team to help the communication between Chinese community workers and foreign travelers in Shanghai.In the post-COVID-19 era when social distancing is still promoted,community telephone interpreting is expected to remain as a favorable choice of customers.However,people’s perception on the role of community telephone interpreters differs sharply with the interpreters’ actual performance,a “role distance” that can hinder the development of the interpreting industry.Furthermore,we have few systematic researches exploring the complex phenomenon and the underlying reasons,which provides good reasons for attempting a comprehensive study on the role of community telephone interpreters.Based on Goffman’s sociological and sociolinguistic theories,this study on the Shanghai MFOA COVID-19 English telephone interpreters answers two questions by analyzing the results from interpreting recordings,interpreting tests and semi-structured interviews: 1)what are the roles of community telephone interpreters? 2)what are the reasons of the role distance?The results suggest enormous complexity of the interpreters’ roles.For the first question,the interpreters play active and multiple roles in actual work.While the public tends to regard the interpreters as passive animators,authors and not specifically addressed listeners,the interpreters are actually active animators,authors,principals and addressed listeners.For the second question,three man-related factors are found obviously contributing to this phenomena—the urgent voice of speakers,the vague language used by speakers and the nontraditional perception of the interpreters.Therefore,two suggestions were given at the end of the study.One is to enrich interpreters’ knowledge on the role complexity before they start working.The other is to offer customer education by setting service guidelines and hot lines,in order to enhance their understanding about the complexity of interpreting.