Study On Medical Interpreter's Role As Institutional Gatekeeper:Communicative Strategies And Underlying Motives

This thesis explores medical interpreters' role as institutional gatekeeper through the analysis of interpreters' communicative strategies and the underlying motives that influence their choices of strategies.The author observed and studied 5 English interpreters' interpreting practices for a month and gathered 62 interpreted medical consultations in the International Customer Service Center(ICSC)at a hospital in Guangzhou.Quantitative and qualitative analysis were used to analyze the transcribed medical consultations to find out the most often used communicative strategies in medical settings.Interviews were conducted to figure out the underlying motives.This thesis found out that as an institutional gatekeeper,medical interpreters serves as an agent of service provider and an agent of control.As an agent of service provider,besides strategies like repetition,rephrases and the attempt to figure out doctor's prescription or patient's given information,medical interpreters also use strategies like take the initiative to specify or explain the given information to patients or ask doctor about the patient's conditions and etc.One motive for the adoption of these strategies is to ensure the accuracy and correctness of the interpretation,and the other is to ease patient's feeling of helplessness so as to give them better medical experience in the hospital.As an agent of control,some strategies are used to speed up medical consultations and to coordinate doctor-patient conflicts and etc,the motive of which is to make sure all the medical consultations run smoothly in the hospital.However,this study only covers medical interpreters and cases from one hospital in Guangzhou.Thus,researchers in the future can enlarge the number of research materials or build a corpus to study medical interpreters' roles from a more comprehensive way.