A Report On The Interpreting Practice For Business Negotiations

With the development of globalization and cross-cultural communication, international business activities have witnessed a sharp increase, and interpreting has become more and more essential in eliminating language barriers and facilitating cooperation. Interpreters, accordingly, have been given increasingly growing importance. Thanks to the cultural turn in 1970 s, subjectivity has aroused great interest among interpreters and obtained much research in the past decades.Although the study of interpreter’s subjectivity is not as intensive and profound as translator’s subjectivity, interpreter’s subjectivity is attracting more and more attention from scholars. Interpreters don’t simply decode source speeches or directly convert languages, but rather transfer different language symbols, link up diverse cultural mechanisms and coordinate complicated communication relationships. How to understand the initiative and subjectivity of interpreters becomes increasingly important and it affects the self-cognition of interpreters as well as the manifestation of interpreters’ functions. At present, interpreter’s subjectivity is mainly studied from the perspectives of philosophical explanation, cultural context, sociolinguistics, cross-cultural awareness and communicative function. As an inter-linguistic and inter-cultural communicative activity, liaison interpreting is widely used throughout the world. In liaison interpreting, the speakers, the interpreter and the audience often make face-to-face communication, so this form of interpreting has the highest level of unpredictability and mediation. Under such circumstances, interpreters enjoy a large room of subjectivity. As a kind of liaison interpreting, the business negotiation is defined as a communicative activity guided by commercial profits, feathering diverse contexts and fast pace. In business negotiations, interpreters should not only remove language barriers, but also hammer at promoting cooperation or helping clients achieve the biggest interests. Hence, interpreters can exert subjectivity flexibly, adopting proper coping tactics to ensure the smooth process of communication and the accomplishment of preset goals.This report is committed to exploring the embodiment and functions of interpreter’s subjectivity on the basis of the author’s personal interpreting practice. The author will first of all describe this practice in details, including the task schedule, parties involved, pre-task preparation, quality control, quality evaluation, post-task summary, etc. Then the research findings of interpreter’s subjectivity at home and abroad will be introduced. After that, the author will list the coping tactics adopted during the practice task, illustrate those tactics with concrete examples and delve into the effect of corresponding tactics to demonstrate interpreter’s subjectivity. The report aims to probe into the necessity and functions of interpreter’s subjectivity during business negotiations in liaison interpreting so as to realize the most effective communication and the greatest interests. Lastly, the author hopes her practice task can serve as a brick to attract jade in studying interpreter’s subjectivity and can inspire the research and exploration of interpreters on liaison interpreting.