A Pragmatic Study of Football Interpreters’ Facework in Mediated Player Interviews and Press Conferences

The paper explores the football interpreters’ facework behaviour through a qualitative analysis of interpreted player interviews and post-match press conferences. It presents a case study based on examples from a small corpus of six transcripts of publicly displayed football-related multi-party interpreted talk. Characterized by an organized structure, press interviews and conferences can pre-determine the contributions of all parties to the interaction towards the common goal of the institution they represent. In this context, based on face negotiation theory that distinguishes between individualism and collectivism, the study aims to question interpreters’ traditional role as impartial intermediaries in conflict situations. The analysis has shown that when football interpreters are faced with conflicting role expectations with respect to facework, they opt to reduce or omit threats in their renditions in attempt to protect the goals of the group they align themselves with.