A Project Report:On-site Technical Interpreting In Process Check-out Of Diaper Manufacturing In The Kimberly Clark Plant

The Nangjing-based Kimberly Clark plant plans to bring in a set of diaper machine abroad and the process check-out is outsourced to a foreign technology company,GPM.The reporter undertakes on-site technical interpreting tasks in this project and is mainly responsible for conversations,group discussions and shift handovers where both foreign and KC engineers are involved.On the basis of authentic experiences during the interpreting project,this project report is aimed to probe into a range of challenges that appear in technical interpreting under the circumstance of plant,and their causes,negative impacts on interpreting and coping skills specified for them will be analyzed as well.This project report will first analyze challenges encountered in the process of interpreting.Firstly,preparation for technical expertise is not sufficient.Secondly,unavoidable noise results from running machines in the plant.Thirdly,foreign engineers speak English with a variety of accents and Chinese counterparts speak Nanjing dialect.Fourthly,short-term memory is overloaded.As to these challenges,corresponding solutions have been put forward,including diverse ways of enriching technical expertise,integration of verbal and non-verbal methods in interpreting,appropriate application of the interpreter's subjectivity,zero translation strategy,linguistic and extra-linguistic expectation,and strategies for improving short-term memory.These solutions will be elaborated on in the body part of this report in hope that these strategies will be of use to those future interpreters.These experience hopefully can be valuable more or less for reference to the field of technical interpreting research.