Politeness in interpreter-mediated interactions. Views, approaches and perspectives

Politeness in interpreter-mediated interactions has attracted the attention of a number of scholars in Interpreting Studies. The most well known model used for the analysis of politeness strategies and their linguistic manifestations is the one developed by Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson. This paper looks at the re- flections conducted and the model developed by Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni in the early 1990s. Here a number of examples of interactions in a medical context are analysed firstly in terms of the Brown/Levinson model and then in terms of the Ker- brat-Orecchioni model, allowing a comparison of the two from a practical and – more limitedly – theoretical point of view.