earticle

영어

Professional interpreter training is centered around the acquisition and development of interpreting skills, which is reinforced and supported through feedback. Throughout interpreter training, both trainers and peer trainees provide feedback based on their evaluation of interpreting quality. Because feedback can be face-threatening, feedback providers tend to make efforts to address the face wants of those involved through politeness strategies. This paper examines politeness strategies trainees engage in when they evaluate peers’ interpreting performances based on an analysis of the discourse of nine consecutive interpreting classes at an MA program. The analysis sheds some light on how face threat is managed in such social and situational contexts to facilitate collaborative learning in the classroom. The findings indicate that positive politeness strategies are associated with positive feedback whereas negative politeness strategies with negative feedback or reserved feedback. Positive politeness strategies identified in the data included positive comments, agreement or sympathy, friendly term of address, and laughter, and these strategies were often used together with negative feedback to mitigate face threat. Negative politeness strategies included a wide range of hedging, such as indirect expressions, subjunctive moods, limitation or reduction, non-final ending and incomplete utterances, and interrogative or rising intonation. Frequent uses of fuzzy and indirect expressions suggest that trainees attempted to address the threat to the face of other trainees and trainers. The results offer insight into the interpersonal aspect of peer feedback in consecutive interpreting classes. Finally this paper acknowledges its limitations and suggests further research that may contribute to the discussion on effective interactional feedback in interpreting pedagogy.