How far can a community interpreter go?

While conference interpreting has developed as a fairly well-established discipline in terms of concepts and methods, interpreter-mediated interpreting, so-called community interpreting is still a neglected research topic despite its growing importance and recognition. Sociological communication problems associated with the interpreter's presence and actions have come into the focus of discussion, leading to such opposing views of the interpreter as a 'verbatim' reproducer of messages in another language on the one hand or as 'advocator', 'cultural broker' or 'conciliator' on the other hand. However, limited research in the existing literature explores the interrelationship of the individual parameters in the context of specific communication event with a view to determining the interpreter's role within the scenario. This paper aims at exploring the interpreter's scope of action in a given situation. In order to discuss this, static and dynamic parameters are established and described in a triadic discourse communication when an interpreter reproduces a target message. This interplay is assumed to take place in the form of a number of interpreting filters (IF) through which a source message (M) passes to become a target message (M'). This whole system is referred to as the Triadic Discourse Interpreting Model (TRIM). Within the model, the filters interrelate static components describing the parameter 'ingredients' of a basic interpreter-mediated communication and dynamic components showing the flow of an original message M through a series of filters (i. e. discourse purpose filter, coherence filter, topic continuity filter, isotopic continuity filter, knowledge filter, interest filter) as decision-making stages to become different types of M' (zero M', partially invariant M' with two categories, variant M', invariant M').