A Study On The Interpreter Role Orientation In Mandarin-english Bilingual Courtroom

With the overall progress of the society and the gradual enhancement of the external communication and cooperation, the relationship between our country and other foreign countries becomes much closer. However, in the current Chinese laws, the related certification and standard of the court interpreter, an essential participant in the progress of the Mandarin-English courtroom, is really rare, which will lead to the unqualified trial interpretation and then to some extent affect the final outcome of the foreign-related cases.For the above-mentioned status quo, with reference to the perspective of the interpreter’s subjectivity consciousness and the Chestman’s five modes of translation ethics, and then by analyzing the relevant corpus and reproducing the trial scene, this thesis focuses on the role orientation of the interpreter in Mandarin-English bilingual courtroom and aims to solve three questions below:(1) How many reasonable role types of the interpreter in Mandarin-English bilingual courtroom under the direction of the interpreters’ subjectivity consciousness?(2) Whether the role orientation of the interpreter in Mandarin-English bilingual courtroom can undergo the examination of the Chestman’s five modes of translation ethics or not?(3) Is there any relationship among the role orientation of the interpreter in Mandarin-English bilingual courtroom?In order to solve these three questions, this thesis at last comes to the following findings, mainly by adopting the methods of literature review, qualitative analysis, descriptive analysis and induction:(1) from the perspective of the interpreters’ subjectivity consciousness, on one hand, according to the Bakhtin’s conversation theory, the role orientation of the interpreter in Mandarin-English bilingual courtroom can be divided as “the information chooser” and “the social coordinator”, on the other hand, based on the Foucault’s power theory, the role orientation of the interpreter in Mandarin-English bilingual courtroom then can be classified as “the conversational power’s deliverer” and “the neutrality’s changer”;(2) These four types of the role orientation of the interpreter in Mandarin-English bilingual courtroom conform with the relevant criterion in the Chestman’s five modes of translation ethics, respectively are “representation”, “service”, “communication”, “norm” and “commitment”;(3) These four types of the role orientation of the interpreter in Mandarin-English bilingual courtroom overlap with and affect each other, and this kind of relationship keeps changeable, for once the interpreters’ role orientation accords with the relevant requirement of Chestman’s five modes of translation ethics, it can be developed and get a breakthrough. This phenomenon therefore also illustrates that the interpreters’ subjectivity consciousness has the properties of the relevance, combination, diversity and complexity and at the same time, constrains by the Chestman’s five modes of translation ethics.