On Cultural Differences In Business Interpreting And Coping Strategies

Along with the world trend of globalization, economic contacts and cooperation become more frequent than ever before. Business interpreting plays an important role in intercultural communication. As a special oral communication tool, its task is to bridge up the parties speaking different languages and holding different cultural backgrounds, and to make the communicative parties exchange their ideas smoothly without language barriers.In business interpretation, cultural differences between Chinese and English in verbal communications such as different religions and values, different ways of addressing, different thinking patterns and the like have always been one of the most difficult problems for interpreters to solve. So the thesis takes the coping strategies to the interpretation of the cultural factors in both Chinese and English as the studying subject.The thesis is mainly composed of four parts. The first part is literature review on interpretation, involving its development in China and the West, the process and a brief introduction of business interpretation. Then based on the definitions of culture, communication and intercultural communication, cultural differences in utterances in business interpretation are under thorough discussion from six aspects. The third part initially introduces Adaptation Theory. A few essential concepts like making choices, three hierarchical key notions and four angles of investigation are discussed. Next, under the framework of Adaptation Theory, the paper summarizes the coping strategies in dealing with cultural factors in business interpretation between Chinese and English, such as literal translation, literal translation or transliteration combined with cultural explanation and free translation and so on, and illustrates how to adapt to the cultural context with many vivid examples. The last part is the conclusion which reiterates the main viewpoints. This thesis provides an overall review of business interpretation from the cultural aspect and will be helpful in both interpreting practice and theoretical research.