Public service interpreting in educational settings: Issues of politeness and interpersonal relationships

This chapter focuses on an application of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory to the analysis of interpreters’ renditions in educational settings. It bases on the analysis of examples extracted from a small corpus of ten transcripts (five in the Chinese–Catalan combination and five in the Arabic–Catalan combination) of recorded role-plays, which simulated an interpreted parent–teacher meeting in a Catalan secondary school. The chapter focuses on the comparison of politeness strategies in original utterances and their corresponding renditions. It explores whether politeness strategies were maintained, adapted, omitted or added in the interpreters’ renditions. The results of the analysis suggest that, despite the important value of politeness strategies in terms of interpersonal meaning, interpreters tended to omit original politeness strategies and focused on the informative meaning of original utterances. Interpreters rarely added or modified politeness strategies.