An Application Of Intercultural Communication Skills To Liaison Interpreting

With the further promotion of China’s reform and accelerating pace of globalization, China’s exchange with foreign countries is getting more frequent than ever before. As a bridge of communication among different countries, interpreting is very important. However, interpreting isn’t just a transformation of different languages. Understanding the cultural background behind both the source and target languages matters more, which can help people to learn the cultural connotation of both languages. Therefore, intercultural communication skills are essential to interpreting. For the flexible liaison interpreting, having skills of intercultural communication is significantly crucial and usually gets twice of the result with half the effort. However, systematical studies in this area are rare in China.By applying the interpreting project "International Friend Family" as the major research object, the application of intercultural communication skills to liaison interpreting is studied in this report. As a practice report, it consists four chapters.Chapter One generally introduces the interpreting project, including the background information and the preparation for this project. Chapter Two defines "intercultural communication skills" and discusses its roles to liaison interpreting. Chapter Three is the case study, which serves as the uppermost priority in this report. By studying the author’s experience in the project, three effective intercultural communication skills:culture understanding skills, interpreting skills and emergency-dealing skills are summarized in this chapter. All these skills can be implemented to interpreting practice. Chapter Four is the evaluation of this project, which includes evaluations from the employer, the client and the author himself. Some suggestions for future studies are given in this chapter.On the basis of the above analysis, the author thinks that as a qualified interpreter, his intercultural communication skills are very important besides language skills. Therefore, in order to succeed in interpreting practice, interpreters should strengthen their own cross-cultural awareness and cultivate their own intercultural communication skills.