Media interpreting is probably the setting where the interpreter is most exposed to a large, yet mostly unknown and unseen, audience. It could be argued, in fact, that it is through media interpreting that the general public creates its own notion of what an interpreter is (the interpreter’s role, skills, etc.). Nevertheless, research on interpreting in the highly specific and demanding context of different media is rather scarce, particularly on radio, where it is almost non-existent. This is even more evident if we narrow down the field to liaison interpreting on the radio.
This paper intends to ascertain how the radio setting determines, if at all, the interpreter- mediated event. Previous studies on liaison interpreting and social interaction in general show how the context determines most of the interactions, relationships and utterances of the interlocutors (both primary interlocutors and the interpreter) during an interpreter-mediated event.
Against this theoretical backdrop, an analysis of the radio setting is presented, with special attention to interviews and the role of the broadcaster. A small corpus has been compiled of interpreter-mediated radio interviews from Radio 3, a station which is part of the Spanish State Broadcasting Company and which frequently uses liaison interpreting to enable multilingual communication to take place. Although still at an early stage, the results obtained so far indicate that this setting seems to require particular skills from the interpreter that have not been covered by current literature.
Finally, this presentation also aims to open new avenues of research not only in the field of liaison interpreting and radio but also with regard to the analysis of the interpreting market.

Pedro Jesús CASTILLO ORTIZ completed an MA in Translation and Interpreting in 2003 at the University of Granada (UGR) (Spain), specialising in Conference and Liaison Interpreting. He also has an MA in Communication and Media from the same university, which he completed in 2005. In 2002 he was awarded a research scholarship by the Department of Translation and Interpreting at UGR as part of a project entitled Language assistance needs for immigrants in Andalucía, and in 2003 he was a researcher on the Teaching Innovation and New Technologies in Interpreting Classes project under the supervision of Jesús de Manuel Jerez. He is currently completing his PhD on Interpreting in the Media and Liaison Interpreting in Radio settings at UGR. He is also a member of the GRETI Research Group ‘Interpreting and the challenges of globalisation: Training and profession” at the School of Translation and Interpreting, UGR. He works as a freelance translator and interpreter and is now working at Heriot-Watt University as a Spanish Language Assistant.