Interpreting Cultural Messages

As an ancient capital city of 13 dynasties, Xi’an boasts plenty of cultural and historical heritages which are loaded with rich cultural messages and attract many international visitors. The transmission of Cultural Messages affects not only intercultural communication but also the image of this time-honor city, even the whole country. This report is based on my own interpreting practice for the representatives from Asian countries during their official visit to Xi’an Chanba National Wetland Park at the 2013 International Conference of Asian Political Parties(ICAPP). It focuses on the difficulties and problems of conveying the cultural messages in my own interpreting experience. Through classifying the difficulties, probing into the reasons behind them, and reviewing the literature of the relevant field, the present research has proposed a set of strategies to solve the problems of disseminating cultural messages in interpreting so as to facilitate and enhance the intercultural communication. The strategies and the methods include literal interpreting, explanatory interpreting, borrowing cultural images, summarizing main ideas from the context, information visualization, and sentence restructuring and omission.