The speaker is being impolite. How is the interpreter interpreting that?

Abstract

Situations in which 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 analysed a political speech by Nigel Farage, a former UK politician, at the European Parliament to examine how conference interpreters render impoliteness. I also conducted interviews immediately after the experiment to probe interpreters' motivations behind their impoliteness interpreting moves. The analysis of the interpreting data from eighteen participants has evinced that (a) speaker-input impoliteness is predominantly 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 identified ones. 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.