Analysis of face-threatening acts against telephone interpreters

Abstract

Despite the growing research in telephone interpreting, there are still few studies addressing it systematically from a linguistic point of view, since the work that has been carried out focuses on aspects related to quality, the satisfaction of those involved, the working conditions of interpreters and the skills they must possess in order to carry out training proposals. The aim of this piece of research is, based on the pragmatics of language, to analyse the prevalence and characteristics of face-threatening acts addressed to interpreters. Telephone conversations constitute an example of distance communication as opposed to face-to-face communication. Besides, interpreted interactions can be considered as indirect since the recipient does not receive the source speech but the translation of it after an interpreter has rendered it in the required language. According to literature, in distance and indirect communication there is a high prevalence of face-threatening acts (FTAs). It is thus hypothesised that telephone-interpreted conversations, as an example of distance indirect communication, will contain a high number of FTAs. The high prevalence and difficulties of FTAs for telephone interpreters have been already signalled but existing studies have analysed FTAs broadly, without making speakers and addressees a variable of analysis. In this paper, we focus on speech acts that threaten the face of interpreters and describe the most frequent ones in our study.