This study aims to evaluate the methodological complementarity of the concepts of footing (Goffman 1981; Wadensjö 1998) and position (Davies/Harré 1990), to study the interactional dynamics of a bilingual, interpreter-mediated encounter. This double analytical lens is applied to four excerpts: two in mental health and two in court interpreting. The results show that the concept of position lends greater focus than if we limit our examination to footing alone. They highlight the participants’ constant and mutual influence in terms of the construction and negotiation of discursive projections, the shared responsibilities among all the participants regarding the different communicative perspectives adopted by the interpreter, as well as the specificities of the interaction at the interpersonal level. The proposed conceptual apparatus also reveals different relational dynamics between mental health and court settings. Applied to larger data sets, it could therefore contribute to determining whether there are interpersonal postural patterns that are typical of a given setting, which would feed into the debate on the interpreter’s role.
