The Impact Of Invisibility On Telephone Interpreting

With increasing international exchanges and highly developed telecommunicationtechnology, telephone interpreting thrives in immigrant countries, and also shows greatmarket potential in non-immigrant countries like China. However, many people doubtwhether invisibility will impair telephone interpreting quality due to the lack of nonverbalinformation. Because of the scant research literature in this field, the academia cannotreach a conclusion on this yet. At the same time, the lack of academic instructiondiscourages further improvement of telephone interpreting. Keeping all this in mind, in thethesis the author introduces the new form of interpreting in details in an attempt to drawmore academic attention to it.On the basis of Gile’s Effort Model, comparative experiments between telephoneinterpreting and on-site interpreting as well as follow-up interviews are conducted in thisresearch to identify the impact of invisibility. The research finds that nonverbal informationdoes not necessarily facilitate interpreting, and invisibility is not bound to impair telephoneinterpreting quality. Through analysis, invisibility has multiple impacts on telephoneinterpreting–a positive impact on the accuracy and completeness of telephone interpreting,little impact on impartiality and fluency of delivery, and a negative impact on professionalconduct. Moreover, the impact of invisibility seems to vary from person to person.However, technical constraints on performance are inevitable for telephone interpreters.And most people have no faith in telephone interpreting.Therefore, at the end of this thesis, the author suggests ways for further improvementof telephone interpreting. The measures include improving the working environment oftelephone interpreting, interpreters’ selection, training and market cultivation. The authoralso points out that telephone interpreting development needs the joint effort of the wholesociety.