Factors Influencing Interpreter’s Communicative Competence During Interpreting Process

As the modern world develops faster and faster, there are more and morecommunicative activities including cultural exchange, political dialogue etc betweenone country and another one in the course of development. Along such a development,the professional interpreters who do interpreting job for a long time constantly reflecttheir own interpreting experiences and sum up them into valuable experience. In return,the valuable experience greatly promotes the late interpreter to make constant progressin their interpretation performance. In the meantime, many researchers who do researchon language field and communication field focus their study on interpreting activitiesrespectively. However, most scholars and experts focus on the research of interpretationfrom the perspective of language proficiency, psychology etc, which confines the scopeof studying interpretation. In fact, whether for interpreter or for scholars or researchers,it is necessary to study interpreting activity from the viewpoint of communication.Since there are many factors (internal and external ones) influencing theinterpreter’s communicative competence, it is necessary to narrow the studying objectsto the factors (interpreter’s language competence, mental competence and role) justinfluencing in the interpreting process. Interpreter, who plays a role of communicativebridge, is not a passive receiver who one or two minutes later repeats the message inanother language to the audience or an “information transferring tool”. Instead, theinterpreter, a participant in the communicative activity, is communicating with the twoends of the communication line actively all the time. In fact, interpretation is a kind ofspecific communication which relates to different cultures and thus becomes complex.Even so, we can not deny that interpretation, a kind of communication in nature, carriesthe characteristics and principles of communication. Taking the differences and samepoints of both communication and interpretation into consideration, the viewpoint ofcommunication provides us another way to further understand the interpretation and toevaluate the interpreter’s performance.It is obvious for us to see that interpreting is a kind of activity that involved in skilland competence. In fact, skill will be finally transformed into competence. So to bespecific, the communicative competence is the most concerned for an interpreter. Fromthe perspective of communicative theory, interpretation can be regarded as a communicative event. What’s more, under the guidance of the theories given by Hymes,Canale&Swain, and Bachman, this paper further study the main parts that constitutethe interpreter’s communicative competence. Instead, the perspective of communicativecompetence provides a reasonable methodology to understand and analyze interpreters’language competence. This paper also proves that communicative competence can beregarded as an important standard to evaluate interpreter’s performance and help to findeffective was to improve the interpreter’s performance. Based on the previous researchon communicative competence, this paper makes an analysis of the components of aninterpreter’s communicative competence, and studies interpretation by regarding it as acommunicative activity in order to explore the underlying complex nature ofinterpreting and to sum up specific ways to improve interpreter’s competence that cancommunicates with people in interpreting activities. Therefore interpreter shouldactively participate in all kinds of interpreting activities to practice their truecommunicative competence by making full of use every context as long as they get thechance. Through analysis of the problems of sample interpreters, this paper sums upseveral practical ways to improve interpreter’s communicative competence.