A Study Of Fidelity In Interpretation--From The Perspective Of Communication

Compared with written translation, interpretation involves a lot of advantageous and disadvantageous factors. To set feasible criteria for a good interpretation, one should take these various factors in mind. As Widdowson (1979) says, it is of significance to make a difference between process and product. It is the author's belief that it is of little help to treat the product of interpreting as static and say whether it is good or not. Interpretation, a kind of oral translation, is communication in nature (Nida 1993: 116). This nature of interpretation finds its expression in the two processes: decoding and encoding. Decoding is interaction between the interpreter and the message originator and encoding between the interpreter and the message receiver. In these two processes, the interpreter is communicating with the two ends of the communication line actively all the time, instead of being a passive receiver who will one or two minutes later repeat the message in another language to the audience. Although interpreting is a very challenging job, successful interpretation is still possible to help realize cross-national communications. What is a good interpretation? It is agreed that fidelity is one indispensable criterion. How should we understand fidelity in interpretation? From the analysis of the adverse factors we have know that it is impossible to produce an interpretation equivalent both in form and in content to the original. Then how should fidelity be interpreted in real-time interpretation which is communication in nature? This paper explores this issue from three aspects: being faithful to the message originator, being faithful to the target language and being faithful to the message receiver, and draws the conclusions that as language has distinct national style, the interpreter should make appropriate adjustments to suit the aesthetic psychology of the audience of the target language, and that as interpretation is to serve communication, adjustments are often necessary to make the message better understood by the receiver. Appropriate adjustments are in fact in accordance with the requirement of fidelity from the communicative view. In short, a good interpretation should be one based its fidelity on appropriateness.