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Top1. Introduction
It was about in the 1980s and 1990s, in the face of mounting communication problems in public-sector institutions, that community interpreting, also known as public service interpreting mainly in the UK and cultural interpreting in Canada, emerged as a wide new field of interpreting practice, with health-care or medical interpreting and legal interpreting as the most significant institutional domains (Pöchhacker, 2004). From then on, medical interpreting has come to the fore serving as the subset of community interpreting and facilitating the communication between doctors and patients when there are some language barriers. The service provider in this process to ensure the conduction of diagnosis is known as medical interpreter.
In the wake of medical interpreting, institutions and associations in western countries began to give attention to this emerging sphere and took the lead to standardize the sector of medical interpreting by regulating the behaviors and professionalism of interpreters. For example, the Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators (2012) and National Register of Public Service Interpreters (2016) all make the rules that interpreters are obliged to ensure the accuracy and completion of every information uttered or signed by all parties during communication. Even though professional interpreters have a clear idea about these principles that require them to work as a “faithful echo” or “input-output robot”, the reality is that health-care interpreters on the contrary perceived themselves as visible agents in the interaction (Angelelli, 2001). In this century, more researchers around the world have already proved the visibility of medical interpreters, including Mesa (2000), Miller et al (2005), Hsieh (2008), Su (2010), Ren (2017), Rena et al (2018) and so on.
The failure to be invisible in the course of medical interpreting is possibly due to the nature of medical interpreting itself with distinct features. Differing from other types of interpreting activities, medical interpreting requires interpreters a good command of professional medical terminologies that might be mentioned in the real practice. No less importantly, other distinct features of medical interpreting, like a face-to-face dialogic mode (Su, 2010) and cultural awareness (Leanza, 2005), are also critical for a medical interpreter. Under this turn-taking mode process concerning doctor, patient and interpreter three parties, interpreters are needed to participate in the dialogue and conduct two-way interpretation in the medical interpreting activity (Wang, 2019:94).
Since medical interpreting is a kind of activity under the dialogic and social context, we selected Goffman’s participation framework as its theoretical basis with the aim of finding how medical interpreter played his roles and what interpreting strategies were adopted behind each role in the medical mediated talks. In this present study, we chose a first-hand medical interpreting practice as our studying object and tagged the script by drawing the methods of Chinese Interpreting Learning Corpus. We found a dynamic role shift on the interpreter, in which different interpreting strategies were adopted driven by different motives or reasons. Through discourse analysis, this study further confirms the significance of sociocultural nature of being an medical interpreter, which is inspirational for both medical interpreting practice and education in the future.