Interpreting Strategies To Cope With Barriers In Intercultural Communication

Intercultural communication focuses on communication between members of different cultural communities, covering both verbal and non-verbal communicative processes. In intercultural communication, participants of communicative activities may differ from each other in religious beliefs, cognitive systems, social customs and behavior patterns. If these cultural differences are not treated properly, it might cause misunderstandings or conflicts, which can hinder the communicative process. Some scholars think that the interpreter, who has a knowledge of both the source culture and the target culture, can act as a cultural mediator by adapting the original message to the communicative needs of the target-cultural audience in order to help facilitate intercultural communication.On the basis of related researches, this report analyzes the author’s personal experience during the 2015 Shandong-South Australia Cooperation and Development Forum to explore how an interpreter can facilitate communication between people from different cultural backgrounds. In this report, the author analyzes specific cases involving cultural differences during the interpreting project to explore interpreting strategies and techniques in different occasions.Through case analysis, the author finds that in an interpreting task, the interpreter, as a cultural mediator, should be highly sensitive to cultural differences in both verbal and non-verbal aspects, such as different religious beliefs, different cognitive systems, different social customs, and different behavior patterns. Based on multicultural awareness, the interpreter needs to adopt proper strategies to adapt the message in the source language to the socio-cultural background of the target audience, such as literal interpretation, addition of requisite explanations, omission of redundant or untranslatable words and variation interpretation. Hereinto, the strategy of variation interpretation includes various interpreting techniques, such as usage of euphemisms, deculturation paraphrasing, cultural substitution and language mitigation.To facilitate intercultural communication, the interpreter needs to proactively play the role of a cultural mediator with flexible interpreting strategies, but these strategies should not be misused or overused during the process. In other words, the interpreter ought to ensure that he or she does not distort or overinterpret the original message in information processing.