Research on Interpreters’ Strategies and Roles in Online Conferences Based on Goffman’s Participation Framework

At the beginning of 2020, the raging COVID-19 pandemic spread around the world, which severely harmed people’s health and lives. Confronted with the pandemic, many onsite conferences were held via video links, which had unique features and brought tremendous challenges to interpreters. Under these circumstances, this research, based on Goffman’s Participation Framework, takes the interpreter Zhang Lu’s interpreting in the Press Conferences for the Two Sessions in 2020 and 2021 as study cases, analyzes participation frameworks in the two online conferences, the interpreter’s interpreting strategies, and roles demonstrated by these strategies, and further explores underlying reasons for these strategies and roles, so as to propose sound suggestions for interpreters to improve their interpreting performances in online conferences in the post-pandemic era. This research finds that the dominant communications were talks between Premier Li and journalists and the subordinate communications were two kinds of byplays between Premier Li and Zhang Yesui and between the hosts and journalists in the two conferences. As the interpreter Zhang Lu played the role of hearers, apart from the traditional role of unaddressed hearers, she further played the sub-role of addressed hearers. When she played the role of speakers in interpreting, she performed as the following specific sub-roles: (1) repeaters and verbatim re-tellers as animators; (2) explainers, reducers, supplementers, order adjustors, doorkeepers of words, doorkeepers of logic, and generalizers as authors; (3) cognitive supplementers, expressers of the speakers’ feelings, disseminators of national cultures, expressers of national stances, and beautifiers of national images as principals. Underlying the interpreter’s complicated roles in online conferences amid the pandemic, there are six influential factors, among which the former four are common ones for all interpreting activities: differences of sentence structures between Chinese and English, constriction of code of professional conduct for interpreters, interpreting’s being cross-cultural communications, interpreters’ interactional powers in interpreting, complexity of participation frameworks in online conferences, and more strict modulation of political powers on interpreters in diplomatic interpreting amid the pandemic. This research implicates that when interpreters are interpreting, they should focus on dominant communications among main speakers in online conferences, be highly aware of speakers’ political powers in diplomatic interpreting, pay attention to differences of sentence structures between Chinese and English, nurture their cross-cultural communication awareness and ability, and exercise their own interactional powers in a sound manner. © 2025 by the authors.