Interpreting Cultural Factors And The Coping Strategies

Interpreting, as the bridge and the connection between different language speakers,plays an important role in the intercultural communications. Cultural differences andcultural misunderstandings increased the difficulty of interpretation and put forward higherdemand for qualified interpreters. An excellent interpreter should be well aware of thecultural factors in the course of interpretation, and be skilled in interpretation to avoid theawkward silence and misunderstanding brought about by cultural misunderstandings.The high frequency of cultural expressions, such as proverbs, allusions and poems, arealways one of the most difficult problems for interpreters to deal with. Therefore, culturaldifferences can greatly influence interpretation. Aside from the language competence andskills, an interpreter needs to have a comprehensive understanding of cultural differences.Also, the thesis takes the coping strategies for interpreting the cultural factors as a majorsubject.The thesis takes the Yale speech of Bai Yansong, a famous Chinese anchorman, as anexample to summarize the discrepancies between Chinese and English cultures, analyze theunderstanding deviation caused by these discrepancies, and explore some interpretingstrategies to cope with them. There are mainly three parties in the thesis. In the first part,the author briefly classifies and introduces the cultural factors, and gives a literature reviewon the cultural factors in China and the West. The second part is focus on analyzing thecultural differences between Chinese and English from Bai Yansong’s speech in history,thought pattern, value system, and other cultural factors such as religions, social customsand geographic environment. In the last part, it concludes four coping strategies: literaltranslation, free or liberal translation, transliteration, zero-translation and non-translation,and briefly introduces three other inclusive coping strategies: equivalence, restituting, andsimplification.Generally speaking, this thesis is only a tentative probe into the interpretation of thecultural factors. The author has attempted to make a combination of cultural communication and interpreting practice, and give some contribution on her ownunderstanding to this study. But with the insufficiency of the author’s knowledge, theauthor hopes that more and more relevant empirical studies would be taken to testify theargument and provide more persuasive information about the cultural factors.