On The Role And Strategies Of Interpreter In The Mode Of Business Negotiation

Targeting business interpreting, this paper is aimed at exploring into the Business Interpreter's role and strategies. With the advancement of china's reform and opening-up as well as the acceleration of global economic globalization, the presence of business interpreting has been sharply expanded as an indispensable element in Sino-foreign business cooperation along the line of professionalization. Despite many features in common with general interpreting, business interpreting is characterized by some defining features of its own, which inevitably exert impact over the role and strategies to be played and adopted by the Business Interpreter.From this point of departure, this paper traces back to the origination of business interpreting, illustrating that it emerged on the historical stage with war and barter between ancient tribes, and the etymological root"interpres"indicates a connotation of"negotiator". In comparison with general interpreting, business interpreting is a two-way communication in real sense attributable to the participation of feedback, which is a necessary component of communication. In addition to the shared features of"instantaneousness","on-spot pressure","individual handling"and"extensiveness", business interpreting also boasts such unique characteristics as"interactiveness","accuracy","cultural adaptation"and"disputes handling". Based on this foundation, this paper employs turn-taking mechanism in discourse analysis theory to set forth the effective strategies in case of overlapping turns and turns with gaps, which, further reinforced by Cooperative Principle of pragmatics and Convergence Theory of communication study, demonstrates that the Interpreter, together with all interlocutors, jointly influences and decides upon the direction and outcome of the communication, thus counterchecking the application of conventional interpreting theory in business context. Besides, this paper also expatiates upon the initiative interventional and positive influence of the Interpreter with regard to conflict prevention and alleviation. It points out that the Interpreter is a facilitator, defuser and mediator in addition to message-transmitter. Then, this paper further elaborates upon a wide array of strategies, encompassing adequate subject-specific preparation, understanding of bilateral footholds, deverbalization, self-monitoring and communication facilitation through non-verbal behavior, adaptation of style to contextuality to guarantee the accomplishment of task-role and relation-role, flexible adaptation and tone-softening in case of perceivable forebodes for potential conflicts in view to steering the communication toward a mutually expected outcome.