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The impact of culture on interpreter behaviour 219

11. The impact of culture on interpreter behaviour

Helen Spencer-Oatey and Jianyu Xing

1. Introduction

This chapter explores the impact that cultural factors can have on interpreters’
performance in intercultural interactions. Of course, all interactions that involve
interpreters are inevitably intercultural interactions, but many intercultural in-
teractions can (and very frequently do) take place without the involvement of
interpreters.
In interpreter-mediated intercultural interactions, there are at least three par-
ties: the two or more (groups of) primary interlocutors who want to communi-
cate with each other but who cannot converse in a language that is mutually in-
telligible to everyone, and the interpreter(s). The interpreter is frequently
regarded as a ‘non-person’, in that s/he is expected to contribute nothing to the
substance of the interaction. However, as Wadensjö (1998: 67) points out, there
are aspects of an interpreter’s role that do not fit that of a non-person. In formal
settings where simultaneous or consecutive interpreting occurs, such as at major
international conferences and diplomatic visits, the interpreter’s function is cer-
tainly constrained by the event, and the impact that the interpreter can have on
the primary interlocutors (although not on the message conveyed) is limited.
However, there are numerous other situations where the interpreter’s function is
potentially more flexible, and it is on these less controlled settings that this
chapter focuses. We argue that the interpreter is never a non-person in such con-
texts; on the contrary, s/he is an active participant who dynamically influences
the ways in which the discourse develops.
We maintain that cultural factors have a major impact on the interpreters’
active involvement and this influences their effectiveness as mediators of mean-
ing. In the first part of the chapter we focus on professional interpreters and in
the second part we consider the use of untrained interpreters. In both cases, we
explore the ways in which cultural factors influence the effectiveness of inter-
preters’ behaviour. The first section focuses on the various roles that an inter-
preter needs to play, and illustrates the (potential) impact of cultural factors on
the effective performance of these various roles. The second section focuses on
the use of untrained interpreters and examines some authentic intercultural data
in which an interpreter’s unsatisfactory performance partly resulted in a very
problematic encounter for the primary interlocutors, to a large extent because of
inappropriate handling of cultural factors.