The Positioning Of Liaison Interpreters And Their Expected Roles

In today's Guangzhou,a large number of foreign enterprises,institutions,and individuals come to China for trade fairs,factory visits,business negotiations,match-making,etc.,hence great demand for liaison interpreters.With such high demand,it is necessary to study the exact criteria of the performance assessment of liaison interpretation.For such an aim,it highly critical to analyze the similarities in and the differences between the positioning of liaison interpreters and their expected roles by their clients.The author writes this practice report to discuss such similarities and differences based on the interpreting service to the executive chairwoman of the Boao Summit for World Youth Growth.The report gives the definition of and summarizes the characteristics of liaison interpreting,and it discusses the five roles of liaison interpreters respectively as employees,messengers,cultural brokers,conflict mediators,and communication facilitators through literature citation,case collection,and analysis.The author hopes that he can deepen the understanding of the roles of liaison interpreting and improve the interpreting services.He also hopes that he can share some good practices with the majority of liaison interpreters and help them improve their own ability by writing this report.Furthermore,he hopes that it helps the demand side of the liaison interpretation to better evaluate the performance of the interpreters.