Politeness Strategies Used By Male And Female Interpreters

Politeness is a cultural phenomenon in society and a basic social principle of communication, while gender differences have been a long-time topic in sociology studies. Though a lot of researches have been conducted on the different grade of politeness and different strategies used by women and men from the perspective of sociology and pragmatics, they rarely have been applied to translation and interpreting. So in settings of interpreting where there is politeness, what are the differences of politeness strategies used by male and female interpreters? This paper aims to investigate the politeness strategies used by male and female interpreters when dealing with politeness situations in business interpreting through an empirical experiment, figuring out some gender differences in the field of interpreting.The subjects of the experiment are 14 second grade MTI students in GDUFS. They are divided into two groups: 7 boys and 7girls. In the experiment, they are required to do interpreting of a business talk and their performances are recorded followed by some interviews with the subjects. The author uses both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data collected by focusing on the comparison of the politeness strategies in the source text and the strategies used by male and female interpreters respectively. The results show that in most situations of interpreting, male and female interpreters use different politeness strategies, and females tend to be more polite and indirect while the males tend to be more bald and direct.Though there are some limitations regarding the small number of subjects and criteria of evaluation, the results of the research provide suggestions and enlightenments for interpreting teaching, training and practice. Interpreters can develop a bisexual perspective in interpretation according to a specific situation, and be more aware of their gender identities in interpreting training and practices. Moreover, teachers can instill to the students more gender identities in interpreting classes to help the trainee interpreters lift gender awareness.