A Corpus-based Study On The Role Of Court Interpreters In China

Compared with an interpreter in general, a court interpreter plays a special and significant role—he or she is part of the judiciary process in foreigner-related cases. Therefore, it is important to observe how court interpreters in China play their role in a bilingual courtroom. However, since the practice of court interpreting is still at its early stage of development in China's mainland, researchers have not paid much attention to it.This thesis aims to provide some clues on how to define the role of court interpreters in China by studying the status quo of court interpreters in China and analyzing their role from the perspective of information processing.The data collected are drawn from the Corpus for the Legal Information Processing System. This corpus is set up for Corpus-based Contrastive Studies on Legal Discourse Information Structure, a Guangdong provincial research project.After a detailed discussion and analysis, the following conclusions have been achieved: (1) The practice of court interpreting in China's is still not institutionalized and professionalized with the absence of legislation, accreditation system, the training system; (2) In possessing information, court interpreters in China employed a set of interpreting strategies, including deducting or adding information elements in micro-level information processing and summary interpreting and the control of information flow by the interpreter in macro-level information processing; (3) Based on the discussions and analysis of information processing of court interpreters in China, a set of communication norms has been outlined to define the role of court interpreters in China. Court interpreters in China act both as translators and mediators.