Effective Message Transmission Of Paralanguage In Community Interpretation

Since Paris Peace Conference in1919, interpretation has emerged as a profession and field of research. Through decades of development, significant achievements in theoretical construction and empirical study have been made in the field of interpretation, in particular within conference interpretation. Community interpretation emerged in the developed countries in the1950s, and underwent tremendous development in the1970s and1980s with the increasing number of migrants to America and Canada. In some European and American countries, community interpretation has become a dedicated profession. In comparison, community interpretation in China started late, developed at a slow pace, and made little accomplishment in the way of theoretical construction. However, with the emerging status of China as a dominant global power, there arises more and more cultural communication and mutual exchange between China and the rest of the world, urging some Chinese scholars and researchers in the field of interpretation to turn to the study on community interpretation. Most of the emphasis is laid on the quality assessment of community interpretation and the role of community interpreters. Compared with conference interpretation, the communicative parties have more initiative and freedom in community interpretation, and display much body language such as facial expressions, hand gestures, etc. These paralinguistic features transmit specific message to the communicative parties. However, in the current study on paralanguage, the main concern of researchers is the classification and functions of paralanguage, with little attention given to the transmission of paralanguage in the context of community interpretation both in the theory development and empirical study.Based on the Skopos theory by Vermeer and Nord, the author summarized the definition of paralanguage and its classification by different scholars such as Trager and Cao Hejian. Taking into account the characteristics of community interpretation, the author proposed, in the perspective of intercultural communication, that the effective transmission of paralanguage casts influence on community interpreting. The empirical study used community interpreting by four MTI students in this university as a case study, and discussed the classification of paralanguage in the context of community interpretation and the influence of paralanguage transmission on the quality of community interpretation. The author tried to answer the following research questions:1) to judge the significance of paralanguage in community communication to the quality of interpretation.2) Based on the previous researches on the classification of paralanguage, to evaluate which paralinguistic features should be taken as priorities for the convenience of interpreting teaching and training?3) to discuss what kind of influence paralanguage displayed by the interpreter has on community interpretation?The results of the study manifest:1) there exists a great amount of special paralanguage in community communication, and its transmission has a great impact on the quality of community interpretation. Lack of the awareness of paralanguage transmission on the part of the interpreters could affect the quality of interpretation, so there is a need to make priorities of paralinguistic features in the community context and to apply it to interpreting teaching, so as to cultivate students’paralanguage awareness.2) The empirical study also manifests that paralanguage in community interpretation where all the parties have a face-to-face communication does not require complete transferral by the interpreters. Some visible paralanguage such as facial expression and hand gestures could be ignored, and some auxiliary hand gestures which could be used to accentuate key points should be displayed by the interpreters. Therefore, in community interpreting, interpreters need to pay special attention to the effective transmission of facial expressions, and body gestures.3) It is also found that the interpreters displayed some paralanguage on their own in community interpretation such as facial expressions, body gestures, eye contact, tempo of speaking, etc. These paralinguistic features would also have some influence on the results of community interpretation, which is worth the concern of the interpreters.This study is a dauntless try in the field of paralanguage in community interpretation, and the results of this study are expected to present some enlightenment to interpreting teaching and practice. However, due to the fact that this research is a case study, there are inevitably some limitations in the research such as a small size of subjects, lack of language diversity, the absence of professional interpreters, etc. These problems will hopefully be solved by researchers in the future study on paralanguage of community interpretation.