A Study On Dialogue Interpreters' Multiple Roles In Interpreted Dialogues As Intercultural Communication Events

Research in interpreting studies has been focusing mainly on conference interpreting, especially the simultaneous mode of interpreting. "In the years following the Second World War and going right up until the 1980's, nearly all the research that was done was done into simultaneous conference interpreting."~1 Conference interpreting as well as conference interpreters has attracted a lot of academic attention. As a result, the profession has developed into a mature phase. The establishment of the international professional organization AIIC~2 is just a manifestation of this development.In sharp contrast, dialogue interpreting, though exiting far earlier than conference interpreting, has aroused little research interest until very recently. In the context of economic globalization, more often than ever, people find themselves brought together in face-to-face contacts with foreigners. This is a change from the past when they used to meet foreigners on television, in books, or in international conferences, where they communicated in a less direct and usually non-interactive way.Dialogue interpreting started to attract the attention not only of clients, but also of scholars of interpreting studies in the 1980s. (Mason, 2006) Scholars pitch in, with different academic backgrounds. Some researchers apply the research findings in social linguistics to this field of study; some adopt culture studies, etc.This thesis tries to study dialogue interpreting from the perspective of intercultural communication studies to reveal the dialogue interpreter's roles in intercultural communication events.Dialogue interpreters are playing important roles in intercultural communication events, despite misunderstanding of their roles within and outside the interpreting community. Due to their physical presence at the dialogue scene, they inevitable play more active and interactive roles than conference interpreters in the booths. They often assume the roles of a translator, a discourse process manager, an intercultural misunderstanding mediator, an assistant, and a scapegoat. Studying these roles played by the dialogue interpreter helps us to gain a deeper understanding of this type of interpreting as well as this profession. Besides, it will provide ideas for us to think about on our present ways of training dialogue interpreters.This paper attempts to observe and describe the dialogue interpreter's roles in the light of intercultural communication studies. Besides Introduction, the thesis is composed of five chapters.Chapter one introduces the basic theories of intercultural communication studies, provides a definition of dialogue interpreting and its characteristics, explains why an interpreted dialogue can be looked upon as an intercultural communication event, and looks back at the brief history of dialogue interpreting as an object of research in interpreting studies.Chapter two explains the basic method employed in this study as well as the source of the authentic data to be analyzed in the thesis.Chapter three describes in detail the dialogue interpreter's roles in an interpreted dialogue one by one, i.e., the dialogue interpreter as a translator, a discourse process manager, an intercultural miscommunication mediator, an assistant and a scapegoat.Chapter four elaborates on the inspiration of the dialogue interpreter's multiple roles on the training of dialogue interpreters.Chapter five summarizes the main ideas of the thesis and points out ideas for further research.