Chinese–English Interpreting and Intercultural Communication

This book provides a contemporary conceptualisation of intercultural communication with an application to one of the most common and yet overlooked types of interactions between Chinese- and English-speakers: communication mediated through an interpreter.

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Chinese and English are the world’s largest languages, and the number of interpreter-mediated interactions involving Chinese and English speakers has increased exponentially over the last 30 years. This book presents and describes examples of Chinese–English interpreting across a large number of settings: conference interpreting; diplomatic interpreting; media interpreting; business interpreting; police, legal and court interpreting; and healthcare interpreting. Interpreters working in these fields face not only the challenge of providing optimal inter-lingual transfer, but also need to fully understand the discourse-pragmatic conventions of both Chinese and English speakers.

This innovative book provides an overview of established and contemporary frameworks of intercultural communication and applies these to a large sample of Chinese–English interpreted interactions. The authors introduce the Inter-Culturality Framework as a descriptive tool to identify and describe the strategies and footings that interpreters adopt. This book contains findings from detailed data with Chinese–English interpreters as experts not only in inter-lingual exchange, but cross-linguistic and intercultural communication. As such, it is a detailed and authoritative guide for trainees as well as practising Chinese–English interpreters.