A Study On Interpreters’ Role In Light Of “Participation Framework”

Business activities are frequent and account for a large proportion in China,but few of the current studies focus on interpreters’ role in business setting compared with other settings,which mainly concentrate on conference interpreting,public service interpreting and so forth.The actual performance of interpreters in the process of communication is often different from the prescribed norms,which even leads to role conflicts.Interpreters adopt flexible coping strategies to encounter.Therefore,it is very important to study the role of interpreters in the business context of China.Previous studies on interpreting are mainly from the perspective of cognition,less from the perspective of sociolinguistics.Besides,there are more theoretical research rather than evidence based ones.To fill in the gap,this paper attempts to study the interpreters’ multiple roles in light of Goffman’s “participation framework” and the differences between the actual performance and the established norms.The present study follows Wadensj? who further applied Goffman’s “participation framework” to bilingual context and puts it to the analysis of interpreters’ role under bilingual background.In view of the confidentiality of business activities and consequent difficulty in accessing data,this paper choose the transcribed discourse as corpus,mainly dialogues,in MTI masters’ thesis(i.e.their interpreting practice reports)in business setting.Wang Binhua’s Inter-textual comparative approach is adopted,combined with some extra-textual means.It is concluded that there is a “role distance”between the interpreters’ actual performance and the role performance required by the“prescribed norms”.Interpreters tend to manifest visibility and choose certain “shifts” as strategies.The study also discusses the situations that interpreters are over visible.According to this study,interpreters no longer play the roles as “conduit”,“mouthpiece”or “transparent person” defined in the past,but rather taking active participation and initiative to facilitate communication.This study helps the interpreter to recognize his/her identity in the process of interpreting,and raise their aware of excessive “visibility”.It provides reference for MTI teaching and guiding students’ interpreting practice.