Report On Telephone Interpreting For The China Unionpay Project

Telephone interpreting,serving as a communicative language service,is held in the form of three-way calling.Featuring with low-cost,quick-responding and around-the-clock services,telephone interpreting has been extensively adopted in the settings of law,healthcare and emergency.After the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games,with the closer cultural exchanges and the increasing personnel exchanges,telephone interpreting takes root in China and is appearing in the field of business negotiating,banking and traveling.This report is based on the China UnionPay project that the author took part in during her internship in Global Tone Communication Technology Co.,Ltd.It is mainly focused on the difficulties that the author encountered in the CUP project and the strategies to tackle these obstacles.This report consists of four parts.Chapter One is a description of the task.Chapter Two introduces the process of the task,which involves the introduction of telephone interpreting,the pre-interpreting preparation which focuses on the staff training and self-training,and the detailed interpreting procedure.And Chapter Three is the case analysis.In this part,the author selects cases for further analysis from three perspectives: quality evaluation of telephone interpreting,difficulties in telephone interpreting and the role and the stance of the telephone interpreter.And Chapter Four is the conclusion of the report,which includes the summary on the task and its enlightenment for future study and practice.Through the task description and analysis,the author gets the following conclusions:(1)The quality evaluation of telephone interpreting is elusive.As telephone interpreting acts as a service-oriented activity with a communication function,the interpreter should pay more attention to the foreign caller’s acceptance and adopt various skills to improve the acceptance,such as predicting,reiterating key words,making a supplementation on the background knowledge and converting the expression.(2)Telephone interpreting is subject to the performance of equipment and the interpreter is under the stress of external factors(specifically,working time and working places).Therefore,during the interpreting,the call center and the technical support department must work collaboratively to create a stable working environment for the interpreter.At the same time,the interpreter must use a dual-headset,be patient and avoid speeding up the call by omitting information in order to make the call end sooner.As for coping with the unfavorable working environment,the interpreter must strictly adhere to the call script and adapts flexible communicative skills in case the interpreter omits information.(3)The role and the stance of the interpreter are vital important in the telephone interpreting.The interpreter acts as a communication coordinator who takes the charge of turn-taking and a gate-keeper who promotes the communication and maintains the image of the client.Even though the interpreter takes a non-neutral stance in the interpreting under the influence of psychological factors,the stance must be adjusted for an active purpose and be appropriate,so that all parties will achieve their goals in the communication,otherwise,it would only bring unbearable results to all parties.