Interpreting Chinese Culture

The past three decades have witnessed the development of China.To realize peaceful rise,China should develop its soft power to win the hearts of people.Culture composes a significant part of soft power.China is resourceful with its glorious cultural legacy.Translation and interpretation of the cultural content is an important step to take when it comes to the promotion of Chinese culture.Differences in cultural schema often result in cultural vacancy,pose challenge to translation and interpretation.Many researchers have discussed cultural elements in interpreting.However,most studies focus on the interpreter themselves or interpretation in general.The user's side has often been overlooked.User expectation survey in interpreting services,especially in simultaneous interpreting has been one of the most prolific and coherent line of study.Researchers have compared user expectations among different user groups.Yet user expectation of interpreting in cultural settings has rarely been explored.This dissertation aims to answer what kind of interpretation do users in conferences with cultural themes expect to get?By extension,how to improve the interpreting services knowing the user expectation?This dissertation studies conference interpreting in the "Training Workshop for Confucius Institute Directors".As users of conference interpreting,Confucius institute directors are cultural ambassadors themselves.Hence they have higher awareness of the cultural content in the lecture compared with general audience.The author uses questionnaires to collect feed-backs and expectations of these users and interview some Confucius Institute directors.The results show that the parameters users care most are sense consistency,terminology accuracy and logical cohesiveness.During the interview,the interviewees emphasize that fundamentally,the interpretation should make sense.They hope the interpreter could be more expressive and actively assimilate the interpretation into their schema.The findings also suggest that interpreters should foster higher cross-cultural awareness.It is hoped that this study can fill a research gap through the analysis of user expectations of simultaneous interpreting services in communicative events with Chinese cultural themes.