2. Interpreting participation

This chapter approaches the notion of participation in dialogue interpreting from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective. In a review of several analytical proposals for the dis­tinction of speaker and hearer roles, it sketches a multi-level framework based on the distinc­tion between the utterance level and the communicative-event level with interpreting as a role sui generis. Following this broad conceptual analysis, the analytical distinctions are applied to extracts of authentic discourse data from case studies in clinical and legal settings, high­lighting the ways in which both untrained and court-certified interpreters may disable the primary interlocutors’ participation by their own active participation in interaction.