Factors Influencing The Quality Of Chinese-English Tour-guide Interpreting And Coping Strategies

Nowadays, with China’s connection to the world closer than ever, China’s inbound tourism has been growing since reform and opening up. This increases the need for tour-guide interpreting, and stimulates a surge of studies on it. Tour-guide interpreting, falling into liaison interpreting, is widely applied in activities concerning foreign affairs aimed at promoting Chinese culture and interactional communication, such as tour-guiding in scenic spots and educational studying visits. Thus, it is quite pragmatic to discuss how to improve the quality of C-E tour-guide interpreting. Combined with common features of consecutive interpreting, it also has characteristics of its own, due to its special venue and context, resulting in the variety of influencing factors on its quality.This paper is a report of the author’s field interpreting practice. By analyzing the performance of the interpreter during the whole task, the author categorizes the influencing factors into three types—the text, the interpreter and the speaker, of which the text contains background knowledge and proper nouns; and the interpreter includes preparation, distribution of attention and psychological quality. At last, the author comes up with some possible coping strategies in three aspects—specific pre-task preparation, flexible adaption during the task and usual practice, for the quality of C-E tour-guide interpreting can be truly ensured with sufficient preparation, enhancement of interpreting skills through rational and effective training and flexibility in the task.