Chinese–English Interpreting and Intercultural Communication

Jim Hlavac, Zhichang Xu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317209973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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.

1 Introduction

Concepts, perspectives and frameworks for intercultural communication

This book is about Chinese–English interpreting and intercultural communication. It is about where, with whom and how Chinese–English interpreters work and how they interact with both Chinese and English speakers. We commence this book with an account given by a Chinese–English interpreter working with senior government officials from China on a formal visit to the offices of a senior government official in Australia:

I can recall a situation where I was interpreting for a delegation of government officials visiting Australia from China. The Australian host, who was himself also a senior government official, welcomed the delegates warmly. At the start there were the formal introductions and the welcome issued to them very warmly by their Australian host. Following this there was some small talk to warm things up. Then the Australian senior government official started to talk about local business and commercial opportunities, and in doing so, he started to add some humourous asides to what he was saying. I can remember a couple of these and I can also remember that they came rather unexpectedly.

I can remember that after we’d left the entrance hall, we were then shown into his large office. He pointed to the framed document hanging on the wall that recorded an important agreement signed by both Chinese and Australian government officials, and very proudly pointed out that the agreement had been in place for some 20 years. All of this the members of the Chinese delegation could fully understand or appreciate.

We then left his office and moved to the meeting room next door. The host, the Australian senior government official, then went on to point out some details of the table at which they were all sitting. The table was circular and had an empty space in the middle. The Australian senior government official then pointed to a button just underneath the table top where he would normally sit and explained that when one of his government colleagues did not agree with him, he would press the button which would cause the colleague’s chair to explode, killing him, just like in the film “Goldfinger”.

At this point the Australian host made a loud exploding sound and threw his hands up in the air to indicate the explosive force of the detonation. This noise and his gesture actually startled some of the Chinese guests. Clearly the Australian host thought this was very funny and that the Chinese guests would get the joke and the background context. However, in my mind as the interpreter, I had no idea if they would “get” the joke or the context it referred to, and was very concerned that they would misinterpret what the Australian senior government official meant; I was worried that maybe they would take what he said literally.

I therefore decided to preface my interpretation into Chinese with the statement that “your Australian host has just told a joke” and then went on to interpret what he had said quite literally, including the final comment about “just like in Goldfinger”. At this point I added “the movie” and also “邦德 007” (bāngdé 007 – Bond 007). As it turned out, once I mentioned that it was a movie and that it was a Bond movie, the Chinese delegates were actually able to place the context (to my surprise) and very politely laughed appropriately at their Australian host’s joke. I remember feeling a great sense of relief that the telling of this joke did not backfire, so to speak.

In this recollection, the interpreter describes how he relayed speech between the two groups of speakers and used his judgement in how he ‘re-presented’ some things from English into Chinese, drawing on his knowledge of appropriate communication norms in the cultures of each group of speakers. This is a regular activity performed daily by Chinese–English interpreters worldwide, and indeed by all interpreters who work not only between two linguistic systems but between two (or more) sets of discourse-pragmatic conventions.

This book gives an insight into both inter-lingual transfer and interpreter-mediated intercultural communication in the Chinese–English language pair. This book contains five chapters and is structured in the following way. Chapter 1 provides a state-of-the-art review of research and practice in intercultural communication. In particular, we explore what ‘intercultural communication’ means in the era of globalization. Chapter 2 looks at profiles and descriptions of Chinese and English speakers and the discourse-pragmatic conventions that are commonly practised by them. We look comparatively at the way both groups communicate and introduce the role of the interpreter as a linguistic mediator. Chapter 3 looks closely at interpreted interactions and describes the most common settings that they work in, focusing on Chinese–English language-transfer in these. Chapter 4 presents data from Chinese speakers and English speakers who use interpreting services to communicate with each other, and data from Chinese–English interpreters. This chapter provides multiple perspectives on a number of situational features that relate to intercultural communication. Chapter 5 provides an overview of the findings from all chapters, and lists the implications of these for both the field of Chinese–English interpreting and for intercultural communication.

1.1 Introduction

Intercultural communication emerged as a discipline in its own right in the second half of the twentieth century following the work of sociolinguists such as Dell Hymes and John Gumperz. It sought to place the study of language within the context of culture and society, and strong research streams have grown within it and alongside it, e.g. ethnography of communication, anthropological linguistics, cross-cultural discourse studies and cultural linguistics. Since the start of the new millennium, other developments have occurred that have further foregrounded the place of intercultural communication within linguistics and beyond. These developments are globalization, increased mobility and, most particularly, advances in technology that have vastly multiplied the opportunities for us to interact with verbal, written, signed or visual texts, synchronously or asynchronously. With these developments we need to keep in mind that the text’s linguistic form, the linguistic repertoire of the author and the linguistic profile of the recipient may be in some cases recognizable, but in others most probably just assumed or perhaps negotiated. For an increasing number of people worldwide, and in an increasing number of people’s communication domains, e.g. the workplace, social interactions, commercial transactions and leisure activities, the way that they engage with other interlocutors and texts can be characterized as ‘intercultural communication’. For many people, “intercultural communication is now the default context of communication in everyday life” (Sharifian & Jamarani, 2013, p. 4). Such a ‘revolution’ has significant implications, and these implications apply not only to communicative interactions in which people engage with other interlocutors and texts directly, but also in mediated interactions where written translation or spoken or signed interpreting is the means by which these interactions occur.

Current research and contemporary frameworks of intercultural communication have generally not devoted a great deal of attention to mediated interactions, even though they present themselves as interactions which, by definition, feature speakers of different languages and cultural backgrounds interacting with each other. This has, in large part, been due to researchers’ keen interest in how participants directly negotiate with other interlocutors and texts in an un-relayed way, perhaps also due to the concern that the interpreter may be seen as the key protagonist who addresses and manages features of intercultural communication exclusively. As such, this book is a contribution to bringing interpreting to intercultural communication, and to bringing intercultural communication to interpreting studies. In so doing, we hope to achieve the following in this book:

1. 1) build on existing approaches and theoretical frameworks, and apply analytical tools to examine intercultural communication in interpreter-mediated interactions;
2. 2) examine the different forms and dynamics that are present in mediated communication interactions and how features pertaining to intercultural communication are negotiated, re-presented, re-directed or ‘contained’ (in a limiting sense);
3. 3) to re-visit and extend our notions of ‘competence’, e.g. intercultural competence, multi-dialectal or multi-varietal competence, symbolic competence, performative competence, meta-cultural competence and translanguaging competence; and
4. 4) to propose a framework, i.e. the Inter-Culturality Framework, which may account for the nuances, subtleties and increasing complexities of interpreter-mediated intercultural communication, particularly among Chinese speakers and English speakers.

The language pair that this book focuses on is Chinese and English. As is well known, there has been an enormous expansion in the relations between China and the outside world over the last 40 years, with both predominantly Anglophone countries as well as non-Anglophone countries. There has been a burgeoning rise in relations – economic, trade, cultural and not least linguistic – between China and the English-speaking world, and the volume of communication occurring between Chinese and English speakers, whether through the use of the other’s language to communicate or through translation and interpreting, is enormous. The Chinese–English language pair is likely to be one of the most heavily represented, if not the most represented of all language pairs in the area of inter-lingual transfer. Yet it has only been in recent years that the mediation of these exchanges between these two large languages and groups of speakers provided via translation or interpreting has started to attract some attention. As stated, one of the goals of this book is to provide a contemporary conceptualization of intercultural communication with an application to one of the most common and yet under-studied types of interactions between Chinese and English speakers: communication mediated through interpreting.

This book firstly provides a description of spoken and discourse-pragmatic features that characterize the communicative features of speakers of both languages. This book moves beyond the twentieth century notion of ‘native-speakers’ as the basis of investigation and examines speakers of both languages, Chinese and English, as first-, second- or subsequent-language speakers. A majority of the world’s English speakers speak it as their second- or subsequent-language. In a similar way, many of the world’s Chinese speakers speak this language not as their first, but as a second or subsequent language. Notion of ‘Chinese speakers’ and ‘English speakers’ will be unpacked further in Chapter 2. This book provides a discussion of intercultural communication resting on a contemporary analysis of discourse that looks at not only the discourse-pragmatic features that speakers bring with them to an interaction, but how interactional features and discourse are enacted and negotiated.

Analysis of spoken, pragmatic and paralinguistic features is provided within a framework that comprises five major areas or theories. These include:

1. 1) traditional notions of speech acts, discourse and politeness;
2. 2) macro-cultural perspectives of high-vs-low context cultures (e.g., Hall, 1964), and dimensions of culture (e.g., Hofstede, 1994);
3. 3) emerging paradigms of world Englishes, English as a lingua franca, and English and Chinese as an international language;
4. 4) cultural linguistics, intercultural communication, and intercultural pragmatics; and
5. 5) interpreting studies (Seleskovitch, 1978; Pöchhacker, 2006, 2012, 2016; Wadensjö, 1998), discourse of interpreters and role-relationships with interlocutors (Mason, 2009; Rudvin, 2004; Rudvin and Tomassini, 2011).

Discussion then moves to interactions between Chinese and English speakers that are mediated through interpreters. Such interactions, although very common in areas as diverse as diplomacy and business to healthcare and the legal field, have only until recently started to receive attention in applied linguistics or translation studies. Empirical data, consisting of both quantitatively and qualitatively focused samples, are presented from Chinese speakers, English speakers and Chinese–English interpreters from a multi-party perspective. Data are presented on how each group of speakers describes their own discourse-pragmatic features, the discourse-pragmatic features of the other groups of speakers, and in interactions with interpreters. Data are provided on interpreters, together with findings from in-depth interviews with them as experts not only in inter-lingual exchanges, but cross-linguistic and intercultural communication. This book therefore applies contemporary theories to the interactions between speakers of the world’s two largest languages and provides a practical analysis of speakers’ interactions, attitudes and reported behaviour. This book is therefore of relevance for those working in fields such as translation studies, linguistics, pedagogy, cultural studies and intercultural communication. This book seeks to help establish and strengthen the ‘nexus’ between relevant state-of-the-art theories on communication and mediation between speakers of different languages and grounded practices in particular sectors of multilingual and multicultural societies, e.g., healthcare, teaching, law and social services.

This book presents contemporary theories on intercultural communication between Chinese and English speakers. It moves beyond purely theoretical or hypothetical discussions of intercultural communication to apply these to the situation of real speakers. These include a data sample of 82 informants (25 Chinese- and 24 English speakers, and 33 Chinese–English interpreters). It examines informants’ reported behaviour and perceptions of specific features in communicative interactions, such as introductory and leave-taking protocols; physical presence, body language; information elicitation; problem-stating; phatic functions of language and affective reactions; speech modification in the interpreted interaction; perceptions of interpreters as cross-cultural experts. Thus this book makes the connection between theory and practice, and presents to the reader multiple perspectives of interactions between Chinese and English speakers, as well as those including both groups of speakers together with Chinese–English interpreters. This book focuses on Chinese–English interpreters who are not only highly proficient in inter-lingual transfer, but also intercultural experts who are in a unique position to report on features of Chinese speakers and English speakers in general, and specifically to the features of mediated encounters. This feature underlines the interdisciplinary character of the book’s focus which will be informed by a variety of frameworks and approaches. The book provides the reader with a state-of-the-art description of the concepts and perspectives that are closely involved in intercultural communication and interpreting, related to Chinese and English speakers. The book contains five chapters. Including:

1. 1) Introduction: Concepts, perspectives and frameworks for intercultural communication;
2. 2) Mediated intercultural communication involving Chinese and English speakers;
3. 3) The interpreted interaction;
4. 4) Chinese–English interpreter-mediated interactions; and
5. 5) Findings and implications for intercultural communication and for Chinese–English interpreting.

Chapter 1 provides a review of research and practice in intercultural communication. In particular it explores what ‘intercultural communication’ means in the era of globalization. In addition, this chapter reviews a number of major concepts and theories of intercultural communication. A mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: concepts, perspectives and frameworks for intercultural communication
• 2 Mediated intercultural communication involving Chinese speakers and English speakers
• 3 The interpreted interaction
• 4 Chinese–English interpreter-mediated interactions
• 5 Findings and implications for intercultural communication and for Chinese–English interpreting
• Index