The Myth of an 'Invisible Mediator': An Australian Case Study of English-Japanese Police Interpreting

Abstract

Recent studies have challenged the assumption that the interpreter is an ‘invisible’ mediator and have demonstrated a departure from the ‘conduit’ role often assigned to interpreters in their professional ethics guidelines (e.g. Russell 2000, Wadensjö 1998, 2004; Yoshida 2007). In this paper, I address the issue of interpreter’s role as an invisible mediator through an examination of interactional ‘repairs’, one of the key aspects of interaction management mechanisms in the tradition of Conversation Analysis. The context of interpreting is Australian Federal Police interviews mediated by Japanese-English interpreters. While some repair sequences in interpreter-mediated police interviews foll..