TY - JOUR
T1 - Interpreting impoliteness and over-politeness
T2 - An investigation into interpreters' cognitive effort, coping strategies and their effects
AU - Xiang, Xia
AU - Zheng, Binghan
AU - Feng, Dezheng
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the National Social Science Foud of China [grant number 17BYY089].
Funding Information:
Xia Xiang is Professor of Translation and Interpreting Studies at College of Science and Technology, Ningbo University. Her research focuses on the empirical studies of translation and interpreting. She has published papers in translation journals such as Babel, Translation & Interpreting Studies, Foreign Language Teaching and Research, and Journal of Foreign Languages. She is the PI of a project titled “A comparative empirical study on the cognitive processing models of Chinese-English sight translation and written translation”, funded by the National Social Science Fund of China (17BYY089).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2020/11
Y1 - 2020/11
N2 - This paper investigates how politeness is treated in interpreter-mediated events and how the treatment is related to interpreters' pragmatic competence. An empirical study was conducted for this purpose, in which twenty-two professional and student interpreters were asked to work in a liaison interpreting mode. An analysis of the interpreters' cognitive effort involved (i.e. the interpreting process) and the coping strategies employed (i.e. the interpreting product) in dealing with impolite and over-polite utterances, together with their retrospections, produced three findings: 1) Impolite and over-polite utterances slowed down the processing speed of interpreting, indicating that more cognitive effort was involved. Professionals were particularly affected when interpreting from English to Chinese, students the opposite direction. 2) Various coping strategies beyond literal interpreting were adopted by both groups. Professionals used coping strategies more liberally and intentionally than students, especially syntactic ones and omission. 3) The overriding majority of the strategies succeeded in mitigating the face-threatening force implied in the utterances. The differences between the two groups are explained by their different levels of intercultural pragmatic competence. This study contributes to the interlingual and cross-cultural study of politeness, and the exploration of the complexity of the interpreter's role.
AB - This paper investigates how politeness is treated in interpreter-mediated events and how the treatment is related to interpreters' pragmatic competence. An empirical study was conducted for this purpose, in which twenty-two professional and student interpreters were asked to work in a liaison interpreting mode. An analysis of the interpreters' cognitive effort involved (i.e. the interpreting process) and the coping strategies employed (i.e. the interpreting product) in dealing with impolite and over-polite utterances, together with their retrospections, produced three findings: 1) Impolite and over-polite utterances slowed down the processing speed of interpreting, indicating that more cognitive effort was involved. Professionals were particularly affected when interpreting from English to Chinese, students the opposite direction. 2) Various coping strategies beyond literal interpreting were adopted by both groups. Professionals used coping strategies more liberally and intentionally than students, especially syntactic ones and omission. 3) The overriding majority of the strategies succeeded in mitigating the face-threatening force implied in the utterances. The differences between the two groups are explained by their different levels of intercultural pragmatic competence. This study contributes to the interlingual and cross-cultural study of politeness, and the exploration of the complexity of the interpreter's role.
KW - Cognitive effort
KW - Coping strategies and effects
KW - Impoliteness
KW - Intercultural pragmatic competence
KW - Liaison interpreting
KW - Over-politeness
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85092020926&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.pragma.2020.09.021
DO - 10.1016/j.pragma.2020.09.021
M3 - Journal article
AN - SCOPUS:85092020926
SN - 0378-2166
VL - 169
SP - 231
EP - 244
JO - Journal of Pragmatics
JF - Journal of Pragmatics
ER -