The Role Of Interpreters From The Perspective Of Goffman’s Participation Framework

Many of the studies on interpreters’ role performance are conducted from sociological perspectives,such as Goffman’s classical participation framework.His refinement of the production roles and reception roles,along with demonstration of important related concepts like footing also proves to be helpful to study interpreters’role performance and shift in community interpreting.Moreover,thanks to further demonstration and refinement by researchers on both sociology and interpretation,Goffman’s theoretical framework has been of more universality.Given that,in the form of consecutive interpreting,an offline community interpreting practice with the theme of Confucianism for two English-speaking sophomores from abroad is conducted.Through discourse analysis of the transcript extracted from the on-site recordings,the interpreter’s role performance in cultural exchanges is intended to be studied.In brief,the study is focused on role performance from the perspective of Erving Goffman’s participation framework.The theoretical framework of this paper is based on his categorization of participants’roles in communication and illustration of footing.Typical instances are selected for discourse analysis at both the macro level of the thematic structure and the micro level of syntax and semantics,and the top-down approach has been adopted to make the deductive research more available.At last,the research finds that the interpreter’s role performance in specific culture-related instances of community interpreting practice is more flexible and complicated.According to discourse analysis,interpreters need to renew their awareness of when and how to perform both speaker and listener roles,so that better interpreting effects are available.