A Study Of The Traditional Chinese Medical Interpreter's Role As A Gatekeeper In Light Of Communication Theory

“In principle,interpreting is performed ‘here and now' for the benefit of people who want to engage in communication across barriers of language and culture.”(P?chhacker,2004,p.28)The similarities shared by communication and interpretation in content and characteristic further point to the communicative nature of interpreting,thus promising a novel prospective for interpreting studies.Specifically,as one of the most important channels,TCM interpreting is conducive not only to the communication between TCM doctors and patients in cross-lingual and cross-cultural environment but also to the “going-out” course of TCM.However,the inadequacy of TCM interpreting research at present has held back the development of TCM interpreting.With the above in mind,this thesis intends to probe the gatekeeping role of TCM interpreters in light of communication theory by means of discourse-based research supported by empirical examples.Based on former studies,the research significance of this thesis lies in: 1)The application of communication to TCM interpreting,which not only enriches the theory but also provides a fresh perspective for TCM interpreting studies;2)The establishment of the communicative model of TCM interpreting,which is grounded on Lasswell's 5w model and Professor Liu's model;3)The concrete analysis of the gatekeeping role played by TCM interpreters in four stages,which facilitates the recognition of various emphases and the proposal of targeted suggestions.The major findings indicate that: 1)The first stage emphasizes the preparation including long-term accumulation of knowledge and on-site acquaintance of information,in which TCM interpreters are able to establish individual and targeted medical corpora via referring to relative books,dictionaries and messages in advance,thus improving the efficiency of information reception;2)The second stage focuses on language simplification and content conciseness,in which TCM interpreters will better filter the information by utilizing strategies like segmentation,reorganization and so on;3)The third stage underlines the terminology accuracy and culture awareness in information processing,in which TCM interpreters are required to give necessary explanations by properly applying interpreter's subjectivity,thus laying the foundation for quality criteria proposed in the following section;4)The last stage highlights the successful transmission of information through achieving fluency and interaction in the process of TCM interpreting.Therefore,the four phases of gatekeeping are progressive and mutually complementary.Based on those findings,this thesis aims to shed some light on the advancement of TCM interpreter's performance,the dissemination of TCM to the world and the improvement of latter researches on TCM interpreting via exploring specific emphases and relevant solutions in the four gatekeeping phases.