Interpreter's Role Conflict In Dialogue Interpreting

Dialogue interpreting, defined as the interpreter-mediated communication in spontaneous face-to-face encounters between people meeting for a particular purpose at a particular setting, constitutes an identifiable field of study within interpreting research and is radically different from conference interpreting.Through a dialogical outlook on the interpreted event that treats all participants in a communicative event as doing interpretative work, the author proposes that the dialogue interpreter is engaged in the communication process, not only searching a lexical bank, syntactic rules, creating coherent utterances, but also due to the distinct features of dialogue, inevitably performing multi tasks, such as shifting foot subject to the primary speakers'alignment, creating turns to resolve silence and embarrassment, stopping and ignoring turns during overlapping of talk for the sake of smooth progression of interaction, and mediating between cultures so as to prevent miscommunication and misunderstanding.By citing examples from real dialogue interpreting situations, the author, drawing from Daniel Gile's effort model, which postulates a limitation of efforts, puts forward the role conflict generated by the imbalance and competition of efforts on the part of the interpreter. Ensuing from this point, the author further suggests that the dialogue interpreter should sharpen his or her spoken discourse management ability as well as intercultural awareness as to reduce efforts in foot shifting, turn management, and cultural mediating for the ultimate purpose of lessening the likelihood of role conflict.