A Report On Escort Interpreting In Sichuan Cuisine Museum

Sichuan Cuisine Museum,located in Chengdu,Sichuan Province,has seen an influx of foreign tourists since Sichuan cuisine is well-known around abroad for its scrumptious taste.In order to help visitors better understand and appreciate Sichuan cuisine culture,the museum invited the author to work as an interpreter between the guide and the visitors from May 4^th to June 10^th,2019.This paper is a report based on the author’s escort interpreting practicum in Sichuan Cuisine Museum.The author’s interpreting task centered on delivering interpreting service between the Chinese guide and the foreign tourists during their visits.During the period,the museum served as one of the exhibition pavilions of Chengdu Panda Asian Food Festival.The author was asked to work as an interpreter between reporters and invited foreign guests in the event.As required by the client,the main ideas of narrations given by the guide should be conveyed by the interpreter to the audience as accurately and fluently as possible.According to the Interpretive Theory,interpreting is a communicative activity,focusing on sense equivalence rather than word correspondence,which is in line with the requirement of the author’s interpreting task.Therefore,the author chose the interpreting strategies to carry out her interpreting practice from the perspective of the Interpretive Theory.Under the guidance of Interpretive Theory,this paper aims to analyze the difficulties the author encountered including information loss,language redundancy,fuzzy logic,culture-loaded words and find out solutions concerned such as omission,sentence restructuring,addition,and free translation from the perspective of comprehension,de-verbalization and re-expression.The author presents this paper from four aspects.Firstly,the author makes a brief introduction to the museum and the interpreting task,which serves as the background information about the paper.Subsequently,the author represents her preparations for this interpreting task including terminology collection,theory basis,and background information collection.Then,the author points out difficulties and corresponding solutions based on the cases selected from the author’s interpreting.Last but not least,on the basis of audience’suggestions and self-reflections,the author draws following conclusions.Seeing that language is the dress of thought,besides excellent basic language skills,the interpreter is supposed to be in possession of abundant extra-linguistic knowledge in order to promote cross-cultural communication.Moreover,when giving interpreting in a museum,the interpreter should give full play to her cognitive competence to comprehend speaker’s words,and convey faithfully the meaning of the source language to audience.To sum up,guided by the Interpretive Theory,this author analyzes the difficulties she encountered in the interpreting and the corresponding strategies in detail so as to improve her qualities of interpretation,which is also expected to provide reference for further researches and to benefit the museum interpreting practice in the future.