A Report On Guide Interpreting

This report is based on one of the guide interpreting tasks the author performedwhen she was in an internship program as a guide interpreter. During that time, theauthor escorted a host of inbounded tourists as well as many a lot individual foreignvisitors to various scenic spots and historical relics. Taking one escort for anAmerican visitor to The Palace Museum as a case study, this report focused on thedescription of the whole guide interpreting process starting from the pre-taskpreparation to the post-task case analysis as well as the application of Skopostheorieto the interpreting part and its enlightenment on guide interpreting.With the ongoing trend of globalization, it is not uncommon for people withdifferent cultural backgrounds to communicate with each. Inbound and outboundtourism, taken as the most enjoyable and available way to realize interculturalcommunication, continue their momentum in the new decades of21stcentury. Themomentum has come and is here to stay. However, the language barrier stands as ahardy barricade that cannot be ignored. Hence guide interpreters come to stage. As anindispensible language bridge in intercultural communication, guide interpretersbasically serve to provide inbound and outbound tourists with necessary informationsupplied in their mother tongue during the tours. Therefore, guide interpretersbilingual proficiency is by every means important to make qualified services.However, due to discrepancies between different cultures, of which language barrierrepresents one, it s inevitable for guide interpreters to come across certainintercultural communicative barriers during guide interpreting. If these barriers cannotbe dealt with properly, efforts to achieve successful guide interpreting will be put invain. Therefore, cracking down these problems becomes the key to effectiveintercultural communication and satisfactory guide interpreting service. In this regard,appropriate utilization of guide interpreting strategies and skills is of great importance.This report represents a combination of pertinent theoretical study and theauthor s social practice analysis as a guide interpreter. Based on the analysis of theauthor s guide interpreting practice, this report proposes that the selection of guideinterpreting strategies and skills can be based on the Skopostheorie. In addition, thisreport summarizes the difficulties and challenges the author met during herguide-interpreting task and offers some suggestions for fellow guide interpreters at thesame time. It s the author s hope that she could do her fair share of work for fellowguide interpreters to improve their guide interpreting performance and for thefollowing guide interpreting studies to some extend.