Analysis on Tour Escort Interpreters’ Roles Based on Goffman’s Participation Framework

Abstract

As China further deepens its reform and opening-up, it has seen increasing demand for tour escort interpreting. In order to analyze roles that tour escort interpreters undertake in their interpreting activities, explain the reasons underlying their roles and propose relevant suggestions for interpreters to improve their interpreting performance, this paper uses case study method to study tour escort interpreters’ complicated roles based on Goffman’s Participation Framework. It finds that tour escort interpreters play the roles of “addressed recipients” and “unaddressed recipients” in the “reception format” and “animators”, “authors” and “principals” in the “production format”. The paper then explains reasons underlying these roles: speakers’ care for interpreters, interpreters’ cross-cultural communication ability, differences of sentence structures between Chinese and English, interpreters’ preparation for interpreting tasks and speakers’ multimodal methods when talking contribute to interpreters’ complex roles. Finally, this paper proposes that tour escort interpreters should notice different sentence structures between Chinese and English, be well-prepared for their interpreting tasks, nurture their cross-cultural communication ability and pay attention to speakers’ multimodal methods when they are talking so as to improve their interpreting performance.