A Report On Escort Interpreting In The Nanxi River Scenic Area

Since Mr.Xi Jinping,the then Secretary of Zhejiang Provincial Committee of the CPC,put forward the scientific assertion that “Lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets” during his visit to Anji County,Huzhou,in August 2005,Zhejiang Province has made remarkable achievements in the construction of ecological civilization system,and has formed a “Zhejiang sample”,attracting large numbers of domestic and foreign tourists.This report is based on the author’s guide interpreting practice in the Nanxi River Scenic Area in Wenzhou,Zhejiang Province conducted on July 15,2022.In this interpreting task,the client went on a guided tour of the scenic area,including four natural scenic spots with different landscape in the area,namely the Nanxi River,the Stone Mast Rock,the Small Three Gorges,and the Ya Xiaku,and two scenic spots of cultural interest,i.e.Taogong Cave and Cangpo Village.During the visit,the author provided guide interpreting service for the client.The task involved a large number of cultural elements,such as religious terms,myths and legends,cultural history,poetry and proverbs,etc,posing great challenges to the author’s interpreting performance.Guided by Eugene Nida’s Functional Equivalence theory,the report focuses on the information loss at the lexical level and the structural deviation at the syntactic level in the guide interpreting.According to Nida’s principle of “creating the most appropriate natural equivalence in translation”,the author put forward a series of solutions from the perspectives of lexical equivalence and syntactic equivalence.The author believes that the proper use of literal interpreting,free interpreting and annotation can better deal with the translation of culture-loaded words,while omission,part-of-speech conversion and voice transformation can make the interpreting more authentic and conform to English expression habits.It is hoped that this report can not only help the author sharpen his interpreting skills,but also be of referential value to other interpreters engaged in similar guide interpreting tasks in the future.