A Report On Liaison Interpreting Practice In Automotive Parts Markets

The report is based on the liaison interpreting practice conducted by the author intwo automotive parts markets. The author served as a liaison interpreter for the wholetask. The client the author served is a Russian man, who works in the industry foryears in Asia. The goal of the practice is to help the client get information aboutproducts and services from different suppliers.By reviewing the practice, the author finds out that the role of interpreter ininter-lingual communication is more than merely a microphone or a languageconverter. Instead, she has subjective initiative, with which she is able to takeinitiative to process the information and have freedom to some extend, rather thanmerely following the speaker. We can see examples of the interpreter activelyparticipating in the inter-lingual communication and interacting with othercommunicators. Instead of interpreting utterance word by word like a translatingmachine, the interpreter tends to add useful information when only interpreting theoriginal utterance is not enough to reach the communicative effect; omit unnecessaryinformation to make the communication more well-knit; ask for useful informationwhen there is not enough background information to support the interpreter’scomprehension of the source utterance; and adjust content and expression of thesource utterance to make the delivery more effective, etc. Such measures the authoradopts actively are to serve the goal of successful communication, which is a focus ofliaison interpreting.In this report, the author will analyze such phenomenon in a detailed way, inorder to highlight the subjectivity of liaison interpreter and show the influence of theinterpreter’s initiative choices in the practice, so as to raise the interpreter’ssubjectivity consciousness. Moreover, by reviewing the different situations the authorcame across during the practice in real working scenarios, some useful experiencesabout making active use of the interpreter’s subjective initiative can be extracted toserve as the guidance of liaison interpreting practices in the future.