Audience Design Influence on Interpreters’ Face Management Strategies in Football Press Conferences

Interpreters play a crucial role in the modern era but are often criticized for their. This study investigates five interpreters for the national football team and the league teams in Iran as a representative sample of interpreters in Iranian football events. Their performances were investigated concerning audience design as one of the probable factors of stylistic choices in their interpretation. To this end, around five hours of football press video conferences were analyzed with respect to face management strategies, including shifts in the interpretation of address terms and deferent statements, conversion of indirectness to directness, replacement of address terms to third- person pronouns, pronoun choices, and conventional indirectness. Despite all limitations, the results showed that the performances of these five interpreters were under the influence of their audience, i.e. audience design. Exploring the audience design notion and strategies to control can improve interpreters’ performance in different settings.