A Report On Interpreting For The Capacity Building Programme For INTERPOL National Central Bureaus In West Africa

This report is based on the author’s interpretation practice for the Capacity Building Programme for INTERPOL National Central Bureaus(NCBs)in West Africa.This programme,mainly presented in the form of lectures,was designed to share Chinese experience in administering public security and cracking down on illegal and criminal activities with twenty senior police officers from five West African countries.The programme covered several fields such as economic investigation,criminal investigation,and actual combat techniques.The terms and logically rigorous sentences contained therein increased the difficulty of interpretation and put a high requirement on the interpreting ability.In this report,the author chose the Interpretive Theory as the guiding theory.Based on the triangular model the theory proposed and combing the authentic examples in this practice,the author systematically analyzed the tactics she adopted in this interpretation task.More specifically,in the comprehension stage,she made use of cognitive complement including both world knowledge and contextual knowledge to aid her comprehension of some unfamiliar or ambiguous expressions.In the de-verbalization stage,she adopted tactics such as grasping the sense unit and identifying connotations to deal with complex sentences,colloquial expressions,and expressions with Chinese characteristics.In the reformulation stage,she used tactics such as supplementing information,omitting information,and adopting idiomatic expressions in the target language to faithfully and fluently convey the authentic sense of the original text.Meanwhile,the problems encountered in the practice are also analyzed and methods to further improve interpreting performance are stated.Through the analysis of examples,this report elaborates how the triangular model in the Interpretive Theory can facilitate the interpretation for foreign police training programme.The author hopes that her experience and lessons could offer guidance to other interpreters engaging in the same type of interpreting practice,and help them to realize its characteristics,so as to improve interpreting performance and optimize communicative effects.