Interpreter's Role In International Business Negotiation: A Turn-Taking Perspective

After China's access to WTO, this country's international trade relationships and technical cooperation with other countries have become more and more frequent. Therefore, the business negotiation, as a crucial means of international business communication, obviously plays an important role, and at the same time, has to face to great challenges. As we know, interpretation is an indispensable part of the international business negotiation, which can make the ideas, viewpoints as well as the emotional communication of the two parties in negotiation far from any holdup or influence caused by language obstacle, even nearly like direct conversation. And some interpretation can produce more special effects. From the perspective of linguistics, the international business interpretation is a very representative and two-way communicative language communication behavior. However, at present, most research on interpreting is based on interpreting skills rather than from the perspective of linguistics, especially from the perspective of discourse analysis. So the author of this paper, drawing the"turn-taking"theories of discourse analysis, proposes that he views the interpreter-mediated conversation as a discourse process in which the primary interlocutors coming from two different language/cultural systems interact face-to-face with each other through an interpreter. Seen from such a perspective, an interpreter can manage the flow of talk by adopting appropriate discourse strategies and, together with the primary interlocutors, may even influence the direction and outcome of the interaction. In fact, the interpreter is an important participant in business negotiation, so he/she should fully play this active role to tackle all kinds of communication difficulties and obstacles in interpreting flexibly so as to help the successful communication and interaction between the two parties of the negotiation more effectively.