Roles Of Consecutive Interpreters In Q&A Sessions

As an increasingly common form of interaction,Q&A sessions deepen understanding between speakers and audience.The unpredictable and colloquial nature of Q&A sessions also poses challenges to interpreters and allows for more interpreter participation.With the increasing number of international cultural exchanges,interpreters’ roles in Q&A sessions are worth in-depth analysis.This study analyzed four Q&A sessions at New York Film Festival.They were interpreted by the same interpreter and altogether lasted 74 minutes.This study conducts qualitative and quantitative multimodal discourse analysis based on verbal and non-verbal information to examine how the interpreter participated in and influenced the communication process.Based on Wadensjo’s dual-role framework of"relaying" and "co-ordinating",this study highlighted six roles,namely utterance polisher,cultural mediator,ally to the speaker,co-interlocutor,performer,and turn manager.The frequency of each role is calculated to indicate behavioral inclinations.The contributions of this exploratory and descriptive study are four-fold.First,this study approaches a rarely discussed interpreting setting—Q&A sessions,to expand the research on interpreters’ roles.Second,this study collects multimodal data and uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods to analyze the role-playing behaviors of interpreters in a more detailed and systematic way.Third,the role classification proposed in this study fleshes out Wadensjo’s dual-role framework,which can provide a reference for subsequent role theory research.Fourth,the findings of this study provide reference for interpreting practice in similar scenarios and encourage interpreters,clients,and interpreting educators to contemplate how interpreters can use their initiative to facilitate the desirable outcomes of communication.