An Analysis On Roles Of Interpreter And Interpreting Strategies "Joint Greater China Mission2013"

In recent years, the positioning of interpreter under different working models hasbecome a hot topic in the academic community. Being the intermediary who helpspeople speaking different languages to communicate, interpreter was once describedas microphone. With further study, researchers found out that interpreter cannot bejust defined as microphone. They began to explore the roles of interpreters and triedto give a more accurate positioning. They used titles such as communicationfacilitator, cultural broker, spokesman of patient and cross-cultural agent to describeinterpreter.In the interpreting project of the Destination New South Wales&Tourism andEvents Queensland Joint Greater China Mission2013, the author realized theimportance of interpreter’s roles deeply. The event provided people a chance to getfamiliarized with the famous tourist attractions and tourism products in the two statesand explore the need of Chinese tourists for outbound travel and their consumptionpotentiality. The author was honored to take part in both promotion and one-to-onebusiness negotiation fair of the project and accomplish the task smoothly. However,the author still came across some difficulties in the project; for example, large amountof place names and numbers and the hard-to-reproduce humor of some speakers.What’s more, the role of interpreter would not be always unchanged due to variousfactors, so effort is needed to deal with the variations of roles.The thesis describes the difficulties and roles in detail and offers some examplesto make further demonstrations of problems. Based on the previous studies, the authormakes analysis on the roles in specific cases in the project and in several otheractivities in order to reach two objectives: first, finding out the factors contributing tomultiple roles; second, exploring some strategies to cope with different roles. Thethesis proposes five strategies including imitating the speaker, knowing the mind ofthe clients, consulting the speaker, softening interpretation and being invisible in duetime.The significance of the thesis is to help interpreters to distinguish different rolesand shift among the roles easily. By realizing different roles of an interpreter and the causes of role changes in interpreting project, interpreters can be more professionaland accurate in delivering the target language. Having a good master of different rolesis able to facilitate the communication between foreigners and their Chinesecounterpart. What’s more, dealing with the role changes calmly and choosing properinterpreting strategies are conducive to improve quality of interpretation.