The Role Of Interpreters In Diplomatic Setting-based On The2012MND Regular Press Conference Meetings

This research aims to reveal the actual role of interpreters in the diplomaticinterpreting settings. The author has put together ten video-taped regular pressconference meetings which are held by the Ministry of National Defense from Feb. toNov. of2012to set up a corpus which is used as materials for analysis in this thesis.The common knowledge of the role of interpreters in diplomatic interpreting setting isinvisible. The idea of interpreter totally loyal to the original text is generally acceptedby the people from the inner circle of interpreting study and the outsider as well.This thesis is going to study the corpus and tries to elaborate why the role ofinterpreters is not merely a voice conduit, a translation machine. According to someprevious related studies, such as, role study in the liaison interpreting setting, in theconference interpreting setting and even in the political setting, the role of interpretershave been reviewed and studied for years. Scholars questioned the conventional ideasof the invisible role of interpreters and they made various studies to support theirideas. For instance, some scholars proposed that the role of interpreters is a culturebroker. Now this thesis tries to prove that role of interpreters in diplomatic setting isvisible.The corpus of this thesis is composed of10transcriptions of the regular pressconference meetings which are originally downloaded from internet and thenanalyzed by the author. The total time span of the corpus is7hours and44minutes.The interpreting mode is interpreting from Chinese into English (C-E). Through thestudy of the corpus, the author hopes to reveal the role of interpreters in diplomaticsettings. This thesis uses discourse analysis approach, combining quantitative analysiswith qualitative analysis. By categorizing all the findings the author explains howthese findings reveal the role of interpreters. Through this study, the author believesthat it will help readers to better understand the role of interpreters in actual world. Asfar as the author is concerned, the role study is a rising domain in interpreting study.