ABSTRACT
A feature of contemporary and innovative research in Interpreting Studies is the presentation of the perspectives of all interlocutors who are part of an interpreter-mediated interaction. Chapter 4 presents data from Chinese speakers and English speakers who use interpreting services to communicate with each other, together with data from Chinese–English interpreters. In this way, this chapter provides multiple perspectives on a number of key situational features that relate to intercultural communication. These include: introductions, role explanation and pre-interactional briefings; physical proximity and proxemics, the role of ‘small talk’, body language and facial expressions; information presentation and elicitation, and perceptions of discursive ‘directness’; leave-taking conventions; meta-linguistic awareness of interlocutors and the perceived overtness of language-transfer as a feature of mediated-interactions. Data presented from Chinese and English speakers are comparative and contain ideographic (‘how I see myself’), nomothetic (‘how others see me’) and attitudinal data about reported behaviour in interpreter-mediated interactions. These responses are matched against those from Chinese–English interpreters to provide a nuanced and multi-faceted description of interactions mediated by interpreters. The Inter-Culturality Framework, alongside other approaches, is employed to show how interpreters use their intercultural competence to manage interlingual and interactional features present in Chinese–English encounters.
