Viewing Interpreting As A Discourse Process

The transience of interpretation results in its being inconvenient to be preserved for later researches, thus interpreting studies started only a few decades ago, far lagging behind translation studies. For the last few decades, with discourse analysis taking the lead, the interdisciplinary approach to interpreting has become a hot area for researchers abroad while in China this field remains unexplored.Discourse analysis has been showing its vitality since its establishment in the mid-1980s. Discourse analysis aims at revealing the nature of utterances and characteristics of social communication; meanwhile it also displays the comprehending process in specific contexts. This thesis intends to apply discourse analysis to the study of interpreting by viewing interpreting as a discourse process in which conversational exchanges take place between two primary speakers through an interpreter. In this regard, the thesis tries to prove that an interpreter can manage the flow of talk by creating a turn, offering a turn, stopping a turn or receiving a turn.Besides introduction and conclusion, this article is divided into five chapters.Chapter One provides different definitions of interpreting, together with an analysis of interpreting's characteristics. Through briefing the three major contemporary approaches to interpreting, it points out the current trend of interpreting studies.Chapter Two penetrates into one of the sociolinguistic approaches to interpreting, namely discourse analysis. After introducing the emergence and development of discourse analysis, this chapter regardsinterpreting as a particular discourse, to which general rules of discourse studies can also be applied.Chapter Three discusses the basic mechanism (turn taking) in a conversation or an interpreting process by describing how interlocutors adopt different discourse strategies to decide how to choose the next speaker, how to interrupt an utterance, how to offer a turn or stop a turn so that they can manage the direction and outcome of a discourse process and achieve their own communicative objectives.Chapter Four takes an interpreter-mediated conversation as a sample to embody discourse analysis in the specific situation, which further proves that an interpreter's active involvement in an interpreting process may influence the direction and outcome of interpreting.Chapter Five describes the negligence of an interpreter's active involvement in interpreting through the authentic resources from AIIC, code of conduct for public service interpreters in Britain and code of ethics in Icelandic Multicultural and Information Center and introduces the tendency of studying the interpreter's role in certain social contexts. In this regard, it challenges the traditional notions given to an interpreter such as "being impartial", "an invisible person" or "being neutral".Conclusion sums up the whole thesis and emphasizes that an interpreter's awareness of his/her active involvement in interpreting enables him/her to make his/her due contributions to efficient communication between primary speakers.