The previous chapter has shown that the concepts of face, face-threatening acts and facework are highly salient in modern pragmatics, but at the same time they cause a lot of controversy and prove quite difficult to describe so as to remain unquestioned. As we have seen, the models described in the previous chapter take into account the speaker and the hearer as the main participants in interactions and tend to focus either on the speaker’s communicative intent or on the hearer’s perception of this intent (illocution or perlocution, to use more precise terms). Sometimes the presence of other possible participants is simply disregarded, but many scholars acknowledge, albeit in passing, that such presence may considerably alter the dynamics of interaction. Spencer-Oatey (2008: 36), for example, points out that “[f]ace management norms seem to be ‘number sensitive,’ in that what we say and how we say it is often influenced by the number of people present.” Certain face-threatening acts, such as criticising, can have much more negative impact when performed with more people listening than on one-to-one basis.
The “view of the interpreter as an invisible translation machine”
(Pöchhacker 2004: 194) characteristic of the conduit model of interpreting would preclude and actually proscribe any influence the interpreter might exert on mediated discourse. As described by Hoza (1999: 44), in accordance with this model “the responsibility of the interpreter is to convey each person’s words,” and s/he is not supposed to consider issues such as the wider social context of an utterance, the flow of the interaction, or implications of face and politeness.
However, at least since 1990s, the conduit model (its prescriptiveness inclusive) has been seriously challenged by empirical studies within various research paradigms, repeatedly showing that its proclaimed norms of invisibility and non-intrusiveness are rather a myth than reality, and that interpreters in fact do influence the messages they
render and play an active role as participants in the communicative event (e.g., Wadensjö 1998; Metzger 1999; Angelleli 2004). As pointed out by Diriker (2013: 27), “[i]n the research on community, court and sign language interpreting, the traditional notion of interpreters as
‘conduits’ and assumptions of neutrality, completeness and accuracy […] have been subjected to a critical reassessment.” For conference interpreting, this reassessment started about a decade later and has also been in progress ever since (e.g., Diriker 2004; Monacelli 2009), although to a smaller degree than in liason interpreting.
In view of the newly reassessed interpreter’s role, it would be unrealistic to expect that the presence of an interpreter mediating between the speaker and the hearer(s) will not have any influence on facework in the interaction. There are at least three obvious sources of this influence. Firstly, the very fact that the interpreter is present, and the resulting modifications of the communicative situation (such as radically different turn-taking patterns in a conversation) may change the way the primary participants act towards each other’s face – which, however, would be very difficult to demonstrate empirically. Secondly, for a variety of reasons (including cultural adjustments and his/her desire to maintain a friendly atmosphere of the interaction), the interpreter may render the facework carried out by the primary participants somewhat differently than it is conveyed in the original. Moreover, the interpreter’s own face may also be at stake, and it becomes a valid object of research once the conduit model is rejected.
Pöllabauer (2015: 158) notes that “issues of face have received scant attention in interpreting studies to date, though the concept has surfaced in works on other topics.” I would add to that my observation that numerous examples of facework carried out by interpreters (on behalf of other participants or in their own capacity) surface in studies that do not employ the concepts of face or facework at all (the section on what I call incidental evidence of facework at the end of this chapter is devoted to this topic). The scholars who do refer to pragmatic facework models tend to choose Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory as their theoretical framework; the other two models employed in interpreting studies so far are Spencer-Oatey’s (2008b) rapport management as well as Scollon and Wong Scollon’s (2001) politeness model (cf. Pöllabauer 2015: 158). Apart from Section 4.4, this chapter will be organised around various interpreting modes, starting with broadly understood liason interpreting, as this is where facework has come under scholarly attention the most often. Whenever examples from corpora are quoted, they are provided in English only
4.1 Facework in liason interpreting 129 (using the literal translations made by the respective author in the case of utterances originally expressed in other languages).
4.1 Facework in liason interpreting
4.1.1 Ad hoc interpreting as a point of departure
It is probably in the study by Knapp-Potthoff and Knapp (1987) that the concept of face appears for the first time in interpreting research.
Using Brown and Levinson’s model as their theoretical framework, the authors investigate politeness strategies in non-professional interpreting.
The analysed material comes from an experiment involving seven conversations between Germans and Koreans, with a Korean student in her mid-twenties, fluent in both the languages, acting as the interpreter. In particular, the researchers are interested in how the ad hoc interpreter handles requests and “the verbal devices a speaker employs to soften the face-threat inherent in that act” (p. 187), as well as in what consequences for facework result from the interpreter’s omissions and additions to the primary participants’ contributions.
Interestingly, the authors assume that the phenomena they examine are, in fact, limited to non-professional interpreting: “[i]n professional and institutional settings, the function of an interpreter is comparable to that of a machine, rewording what is said in language A in language B and vice versa” (p. 182). In particular, they rule out that a simultaneous conference interpreter, working from a booth, should have any significant influence on the facework employed in the source text. Consequently, in their perception of the interpreter’s role they clearly ascribe to the conduit model. However, they also mention that certain FTAs, especially in relatively distant cultures, might display culture-specific features, and it is not clear whether or not they see it as the (professional) interpreter’s duty to modify such FTAs so that their impact should remain the same in the target language.
The authors note the difficulties in determining the reasons for some discrepancies between the source text and the target text. Not everything can be attributed to deliberate attempts on the part of the interpreter to mitigate what is said, that is, to “strategies for managing the situation without conflict and misunderstanding” (p. 190) – frequently factors
such as the interpreter’s memory limitations or language problems may come into play. However, they rightly point out that additions can, more safely than omissions, be treated as the interpreter’s strategic choices. Also such omissions that form systematic patterns are probably deliberate rather than accidental.
The German speakers’ typical politeness strategies (claiming common ground, minimising the imposition by means of appropriate verb aspect and downtoning particles such as schon or vielleicht) are usually eliminated by the interpreter, unless placed within a single turn that contains no other propositions. Consequently, the German speakers may be perceived by their Korean interlocutors as less polite than they really are. On the other hand, the interpreter takes her own initiative to introduce certain politeness strategies that are not present in the source text, which, according to the authors, strongly suggests that she is “very much concerned with saving her own face” (p. 198). For example, she switches into the third person to distance herself from face-threatening utterances of the German speakers (such as a direct question about the interlocutor’s age, which she clearly perceives as too personal), although normally she renders everything in the first person.
The authors conclude that the interpreter’s own face is apparently an important factor in the interactions they analyse, and they suggest the existence of two dangers that might threaten it. One results from the interpreter’s identification with one of the primary participants; if this happens, a threat to the participant’s face is also felt to be a threat to the interpreter’s face (although, as rightly pointed out by Wadensjö (1998: 78), no adequate examples of this are offered throughout the analysis). The other threat results from the requirements and the expectations of the primary participants, who wish to be represented adequately and be granted access to the conversation.
Knapp-Potthoff and Knapp’s study (1987), although not free from imperfections (of which its normative bias is probably the most striking), can definitely be seen as a pioneering one, in that it “does provide a number of pointers for future research, and […] suggests that politeness is a major factor in dialogue interpreting exchanges” (Mason 2000: 223). In fact, although this study is limited to the performance of only one bilingual acting as an ad hoc, untrained interpreter, some of the tentative findings are replicated later even in studies on high-profile professional interpreting (e.g., Duflou 2012 gives numerous examples of situations in which EU interpreters depart from the “first person norm” and switch into the third person; see Section 4.4). A similar study by Müller (1989), published shortly thereafter, also makes the same sharp distinction between a professional interpreter, envisaged
4.1 Facework in liason interpreting 131 as a “voice ex machina from behind the scene” (p. 714) and a non-professional interpreter, whom the mode of “natural translation” allows much more leeway to engage in mediating between the interactants.
Müller, however, emphasises that ad hoc interpreting often takes place between participants who partly know each other’s language, as is the case for his material, where Italian immigrants living in Germany and Germans sometimes rely on the interpreter, and sometimes are able to understand each other without help.
Knapp-Potthoff (2005) maintains her interest in mediation of politeness by ad hoc interpreters with another, much more recent experimental study, in which three advanced students of English are asked to act as interpreters in a telephone conversation. The scenario of the conversation involves a speaker of German asking a speaker of English (both university teachers) to return to the library an overdue book that the former urgently needs (and is therefore face-threatening for the latter). In one of the three versions, the German speaker is considerably more impolite than in the other two. This marked difference undergoes “levelling of politeness” (p. 207) in the interpretations, which means that the polite versions become less polite, and the impolite version becomes more polite. This results from the interpreters’ far-reaching omission of both politeness and impoliteness strategies. The author hypothesises that this effect might be inherent in interpretations, since some (im)politeness strategies are not easily accessible to language mediation. Consequently, she poses a very apt question concerning users’ attitude: “Is the expectation of receiving politeness in mediated discourse the same for the primary interactants as in immediate types of discourse, or do they take into account that secondhand politeness may be ‘worn-out’?” (p. 218).
Drawing no clear dividing line between unprofessional and professional interpreting this time (after all, its existence has already been put to doubt in the meantime by research reported in the next section), Knapp-Potthoff (2005: 216) notes that “any mediation of a face-threatening act potentially constitutes a threat to the mediator’s face, too,” as s/he may be held partly responsible for the illocutionary force of the act. Therefore, the typical strategy to save the interpreter’s face is to use what she calls “explicit mediator performatives” (p. 216), which consist in reporting an FTA in the third person, for example he thinks that or he asks you to.
This study’s innovativeness lies in going beyond the verbal aspect of the analysed material by devoting a lot of attention to laughter as a politeness strategy introduced specifically by interpreters. The participants in the experiment frequently resort to it as redress for FTAs
they are required to voice. As argued by the author, “by employing laughter as a politeness strategy, the mediator is freed from the burden of verbalising a politeness strategy in a given language” (p. 215), so it seems indeed to be a very handy compensation for omitted politeness, maintaining the faces of both the primary interlocutors and the interpreter at the same time.
4.1.2 Professional interpreting
It was probably the already mentioned domination of the conduit model that limited the interest in professional interpreting as an object of this kind of research until 1990s. Problems with access to authentic data (confidentiality issues, obtaining permission from all the participants and the institutions involved), which might have seemed insurmountable, certainly played a role, too. The topic of facework in interpreting, this time performed by professionals and observed in authentic legal and medical settings, returns to the stage in Wadensjö’s book on dialogue interpreting (1998) that has often, very deservedly, been described as “groundbreaking” (e.g., Pöllabauer 2015: 159). Its descriptive approach is definitely new and at the same time very liberating, allowing the author to look at interpreting as it is, without devoting much attention to how it should be and in what ways it fails to live up to the normative ideal of “just translating,” still practically unquestioned at the time the first version of the study was published in 1992.
Wadensjö (1998) uses discourse-analytic tools to investigate, in much detail, authentic interpreter-mediated conversations with speakers of Russian taking place at Swedish police stations and healthcare clinics.
The very fact that she has managed to obtain such sensitive material, comprising 20 encounters mediated by five different state-certified interpreters, is unprecedented at the time. The researcher was present to observe the conversations she recorded and, whenever possible, the session was followed by an interview with the participants. Wadensjö’s work is largely inspired by Erving Goffman’s thought, but this is not limited to his concept of face, as other notions, that is, the participation framework and the social role, are given even more prominence. In particular, different aspects of the social role are emphasised: Wadensjö is well aware of the interpreter’s normative role ratified by codes of conduct as well as taken for granted by institutions making use
4.1 Facework in liason interpreting 133 of interpreting services and interpreters themselves, but she sets out to investigate the typical role instead, that is, typical behaviour of interpreters in real interpreted-mediated encounters.
Importantly, the analysis shows that many interpreters’ utterances actually are not even supposed to reflect any original ones, but have the function of coordinating the interaction: “[i]n dialogue interpreting, the translating and coordinating aspects are simultaneously present, and the one does not exclude the other” (p. 105). Therefore, interpreters simply cannot avoid acting as both translators and mediators. The utterances that reformulate original ones (renditions) are divided into several classes: close, expanded, reduced, substituted, summarised and multi-part. Furthermore, the comparison of the interpreter’s output with the original also reveals zero-renditions (i.e., omissions of content present in the original) and non-renditions (text fragments that are
“analysable as an interpreter’s initiative or response which does not correspond […] to a prior ‘original’ utterance,” p. 108).
Instances of facework performed by interpreters surface throughout the analysis. For example, when a police officer asks an applicant for Swedish residence permit if she understands the difference between nationality and citizenship (and thus threatens her face by assuming her possible ignorance), the interpreter does not formulate this as a question but explains the difference instead. Wadensjö describes this situation as a clash between two of the interpreter’s tasks:
delivering a close translation and “establishing necessary conditions for a shared and mutual exchange” (p. 113), in which the interpreter decides to sacrifice closeness for the sake of good rapport between the interactants. Observing the same interpreter over the course of several sessions, the researcher notes that it is a part of her personal style to prevent any hostility between the interactants and to mitigate FTAs, even at the cost of putting the blame for misunderstandings on herself. The more risk of conflict there is, the more the interpreter goes to lengths to protect the friendly relations. According to Wadensjö, this strategy is not uncommon among interpreters, and it is manifest, for example, in the routine change of the more formal polite Russian form of address vy into the more friendly and less formal Swedish second person singular. The researcher assumes that more experienced and self-confident interpreters are less uncomfortable with possible conflict between the interactants and do not act overprotective, allowing the interactancts to sort out their differences instead of concealing them. “In ‘protecting’ interaction from potential ‘disturbance,’ you also prevent people from expressing their frustration, irritation and
anger, and you ‘protect’ their counterparts from learning about what others expect and take for granted,” concludes Wadensjö (1998: 133).
Another interesting example relates to interpreting in a medical context. A young Russian man, worried that he might have contracted a venereal disease, is asked by a nurse about his symptoms. The man is visibly embarrassed and produces an utterance that is very long, fragmented, repetitive and does not actually contain the information the nurse expects. The interpreter, while waiting to hear some meaningful input, reassures the man with backchannelling noises and tells him not to be embarrassed (which are her own initiatives). At the same time, she does not report anything to the nurse for quite a long time, until the nurse becomes impatient and demands to be told what the young man is saying. The interpreter, then, addresses the nurse directly and explains that the patient has not produced a whole sentence yet. The situation is very complex: the patient wants to save his face, but the interpreter also has some concerns about her own face as a professional:
“she must see to it that the primary parties’ confidence in her as translator and coordinator is not jeopardized” (p. 177). In addition, the interpreter may also have other social identities, and the fact that she grew up in the USSR and is not used to sex matters being talked about as openly as they normally are in Sweden is visible at the beginning of the conversation; her hesitating and stumbling manner of speaking when rendering the nurse’s question reveals awkwardness. Later on, she begins to talk in a more matter-of-fact way, like the nurse. The interpreter perceives many possible face threats in this exchange (to the man’s face, to her own professional face, and to her own private face) and engages in facework, hoping to save them all. This is why she departs from the usual pattern of interpreted conversation and gets involved in separate exchanges with the participants.
In a review of the 1992 version of Wadensjö’s study, Van Dam and Schjoldager (1994: 172) wrote: “the book reflects the whole range of features of the new paradigm in translation studies and may, therefore, be seen as a suggestion to other interpreting scholars of a way of carrying out interpreting research within this framework.” Indeed, it has been a trigger for more research of a similar kind, stretching
In a review of the 1992 version of Wadensjö’s study, Van Dam and Schjoldager (1994: 172) wrote: “the book reflects the whole range of features of the new paradigm in translation studies and may, therefore, be seen as a suggestion to other interpreting scholars of a way of carrying out interpreting research within this framework.” Indeed, it has been a trigger for more research of a similar kind, stretching