%I Akadémiai Kiadó
%L discovery10203226
%A Caiwen Wang
%T The Speaker Is Being Impolite. How Is the Interpreter Interpreting That?
%J Across Languages and Cultures: a multidisciplinary journal for translation and interpreting studies
%K conference interpreters, impoliteness interpreting, interview, retrospections, simultaneous
interpreting
%X Situations where a source speaker attacks their addressee’s face pose a challenge for interpreters, due
to the potential controversy or conflicts to which impoliteness is prone from a pragmatic perspective.
In this study, I drew upon Bousfield’s (2008) linguistic model of impoliteness and used a political
speech by Nigel Farage, a former UK politician, at the European Parliament to examine how conference
interpreters interpret impoliteness. I also conducted an interview immediately after the experiment to
probe interpreters’ motivations behind their impoliteness interpreting moves. Analysis of the
interpreting data from eighteen participants has evinced that (a) speaker-input impoliteness is
predominately attenuated by interpreters and is seldom strengthened, and (b) for less experienced
interpreters, attenuation is consistently the most frequent manoeuvre to interpret impoliteness among
the five ones discovered; for more experienced interpreters, attenuations decrease in number and close
renditions increase, with the latter sometimes surpassing the former; More experienced interpreters also
have much less or no omissions or misrepresentations. Analysis of the interview data indicates that (a)
attenuations and close renditions are interpreters’ intended decisions, and (b) omissions and
misrepresentations are forced options. It is hoped that the findings from the current study will contribute
to the literature on impoliteness interpreting.
%O This version is the author-accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
%D 2025