| Since the 21st century,telephone interpreting as an emerging type of community interpreting service has witnessed a growing demand and emerged in major cities in China.As the development of telephone interpreting is later than other form of community interpreting,the study in this field has not yet reached its maturity.Few studies have paid special attention to telephone interpreting from the perspective of social communication,especially from interpreter’s perspective.The present study aims to explore the interpreter’s roles in the telephone interpreting tasks in Beijing Multilingual Service Center.To demonstrate a comprehensive picture of the interpreter’s roles in telephone interpreting,the present study adopts both discourse analysis and semi-structured interview as research methodology.The discourse analysis is conducted with Goffman’s sociolinguistic theory of participation framework and the notion of footing,analyzing interpreter’s actual role performance with recording transcripts.The interview design is based on previous studies of telephone interpreter’s roles,focusing on the interpreter’s perception of role-playing in the telephone conversation.The present study finds that(1)the interactional pattern of interpreter-mediated telephone conversation is complicated with the interpreter’s renditions and nonrenditions intertwined with each other.In most cases interpreter participates in two parallel dyadic conversations with primary parties,but sometimes the two parties interact without interpreter’s rendering and thus break the two-parallel-conversation pattern,(2)in actual performance,interpreter serves as a co-participant of the telephone conversation,being responsible for controlling the turn-taking,filtering the information and providing personal suggestions.The shift in footing indicates that interpreter’s stance varies in different contexts,(3)in interpreters’ own perception,they actively coordinate the communication rather than just interpret.They use different personal pronouns and take different stances in communication with different parties.In summary,there is no obvious difference between the telephone interpreter’s actual role performance and role perception.The result of discourse analysis and the interview are mutually reinforcing,indicating that the interpreters in Beijing Multilingual Service Center play flexible roles in the context of telephone interpreting.They work as a language facilitator,a communication coordinator,an information gatekeeper,an aide for Chinese public service departments,and sometimes an advocate for foreign callers.The present study is a new attempt to adopt Goffman’s sociolinguistic model in the study of telephone interpreting,enhancing the understanding of the complexity of telephone interpreter’s roles and changing the stereotype of telephone interpreter as being completely neutral or "invisible".Additionally,findings of the study also contribute to providing a reference to telephone interpreting institutions for improving the training and evaluation standard of the interpreters. |
