The Roles Of Liaison Interpreters: A Practice Report On Liaison Interpreting For The 10^th Tenth Guangzhou International Documentary Festival（GZDOC）

This thesis mainly focuses on the role of liaison interpreters, problems that the author met during a liaison interpreting and possible coping tactics to these problems.This report, based on the author’s practice of liaison interpreting at the 2013 Guangzhou International Documentary Festival(GZDOC), analyzes the characteristics, problems and possible solutions of liaison interpreting. The discussion concentrates on four roles that the author played during her liaison interpreting: the role of an employee of the organizer, a personal assistant, a conflict mediator and an interpreter.Although, the author has made full preparation before the task, such collecting all information about the festival GZDOC and about her client Pat Fern and she still encounters some unexpected problems including some non-linguistic problems such as,confused instructions and awkward silence, as well as some linguistic difficulties like uncertain message, interrupted turns, and redundant information. Since liaison interpreting involves various kinds of roles which result in overloaded tasks for liaison interpreters, thus, it is the characteristics of liaison interpreting that decides the strategy of flexibility is a viable way to tackle those problems.Here in this real-life practice, the author has adopted this strategy to solve linguistic problems in the form of adding, omitting, supplementing and consulting, and also take flexible methods to create turns of communication to break the ice. And in this way, communicative function of liaison interpreting can be attained.It is hoped that this report could shed some light on potential interpreters who might have interest in liaison interpreting.