Interpreter visibility at high-profile political events is rarely incidental. During the Tsai Ing-wen presidency (2016–2024), the Taiwanese government systematically foregrounded interpreter presence at election-night press conferences, National Day livestreams, and foreign delegation meetings as a component of outward-facing state communication. Visible interpreters functioned not as linguistic mediators alone but as signals of democratic governance directed at international audiences

Grounded in Spolsky's tripartite model of language policy and Schäffner's account of interpreting as political institutional practice, the analysis situates interpreting configurations within two policy developments of the Tsai period: the New Southbound Policy, which broadened the range of languages in external communication, and the statutory recognition of Taiwanese, Hakka, indigenous languages, and Taiwan Sign Language as national languages. Three sets of materials are examined: official recordings and press releases archived on the Presidential Office website, examined for the languages provided, the on-screen presence of interpreters, subtitle language, and attribution, and compared across the period to identify changes in configuration; Taiwanese mainstream news coverage of these events; and a practitioner-scholar's first-person report on interpreting at a presidential press conference (Fan, 2021). Read against Spolsky's distinction between practices, beliefs, and management, these materials trace interpreter visibility as a managed feature of state communication.

Comparison with the preceding administration, in which low-visibility configurations were the institutional norm, and with the current one, which shows a partial return to them, reveals that these choices constitute an index of shifting state orientations toward multilingual public communication and international legitimacy. Because presidential addresses circulate through multiple broadcast and online channels, decisions about interpreter presence carry weight beyond the original event context. By treating interpreter visibility as a language management decision embedded in broader political communication strategy, the paper contributes to institutional approaches to interpreting and to scholarship on language policy in polities of contested international status.