Lee, Eunsun2020-05-122020-05-122019http://hdl.handle.net/10125/67847In East Asia, there have been an increasing number of multilateral forums organized by nonprofit organizations to promote mutual understanding and civil exchanges in the past two decades. Language becomes a major issue at these forums, in which participants often rely on voluntary interpreters to communicate with one another unlike many large-scale intergovernmental organizations that adopt a third language as their lingua franca. This paper explores the construction of cooperative discourse in interaction at a Korea-Japan bilateral student forum. In particular, it analyzes how participants strategically design their talks to enable effective delivery of their opinions and how the interpreter responds to those strategies by actively reconstructing the original speakers’ discourse. The findings identified two ways in which the interpreter played a key role in establishing cooperative discourse: by polishing the participants’ utterances while also maintaining the critical components of their mitigation and outlining strategies and by showing alignment with the speaker, the audience, and the content of the talks. These findings shed light on ways participants and the interpreter collaboratively display orientation to and discursively construct the institutional goal of promoting cooperation between the two countries.33 pagesen-USWorking Paper