Challenges And Coping Strategies Of Consecutive Interpreting Between Chinese And English In Remote Conference Setting

The COVID 19 pandemic accelerated the development of remote interpreting for consideration of travel restrictions,safety concern,cost and budget,communication demand,etc.There is no doubt that remote interpreting will play an undeniable role in the post-COVID era.Against this backdrop,however,interpreters will be challenged in a completely new way.This paper,mainly based on an online art talk between ARTCaffe and Yangyang Meng,is meant to showcase real-life challenges as the result of three characteristics of remote interpreting: inclusion of multimodal information,lack of non-verbal information,reliance on the Internet and technologies.To be specific,absence of visual feedbacks causes mental pressure and delay of visual information leads to mistranslation;unstable Internet connection brings about listening difficulties and digital reference distracts attention;changes in surroundings exert anxiety and interactive text messages causes misallocation of attention.Furthermore,the author proposes respective methods to help readers better cope with remote interpreting.To be specific,interpreters can optimize their efforts’ redistribution and stay agile to change different interpreting strategies depending on the circumstances;they should do imagery training,enhance preparation and focus more on filtering out useless information during training;they are advised to do technical preparation and follow the KISS principle.Through the case analysis,the author hopes to deepen the understanding about remote interpreting and challenges while shedding some light on how to adapt to it.