The Role of Court Interpreters Under the Attitude of Appraisal Theory Case Study on Sun Yang’s Public Hearing

Abstract

The role of interpreters standing as a controversial topic has aroused unquiet debates in academia of interpreting studies. Traditional interpreting studies emphasize faithfulness during interpreting process and treat interpreters as handy tools for translation. However, at courts, the complication of the contents and various demands of parties bring the viewpoint of “translation machine” into question. On the other hand, the subjectivity of interpreters has received an increasing popularity in academic field. Based on the Attitude of Appraisal Theory promoted by James R. Martin, this paper tries to explore the role of court interpreters in the case of Sun Yang’s public hearing which was held by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in November, 2019. With the collection of the transcription of cross-examination of four witnesses, this study mainly identified and marked the attitudinal resources in original and interpreted texts by means of qualitative and quantitative research methods. The comparative analysis of the study reveals that there are some differences in attitudinal resources, accompanying with their realizations between the source and interpreted texts. The results indicate that interpreters can play multiple roles with “conduit” as their primary role and “helper” or “communication facilitator” as the secondary role. Besides the analysis of Sun Yang’s public hearing from appraisal perspective, this study is aiming to enhance court interpreters’ identification and emphasize interpreters’ subjectivity, as well as providing some insights for court interpreter training.