A Report On Interpreting For Foreign Military Training Classes From The Perspective Of The Turn-taking Strategies

Interpreting activities,in essence,are linguistic and social acts of communication among people of different languages and cultures.Hence the interpreter should be considered as one of the active agents in this dynamic discourse process.And the Turn-taking Mechanism,as the basic form of organization for discourse interaction,could be taken as a reference for interpreters who can find solutions to communicative problems based on the Turn-taking Mechanism and related rules,theories and strategies.In this report,the author intends to apply Conversation Analysis to the study of interpreting by viewing the interpreter-mediated class conversation as a discourse process.From this point,the interpreting process can be analyzed from the perspective of the Turn-taking Mechanism.Based on the internship in the PLA Information Engineering University as an interpreter for the Foreign Military Personnel Training Group,the reporter makes a theoretical exploration and a case analysis of the turn-taking organization in class interpreting as well as the application of turn-taking strategies for interpreters in interpreter-mediated conversations.This thesis contends that the turn-taking organization in class interpreting is an extension of the common turn-taking system.Due to the participation of the interpreter,the traditional binary turn-taking model between the teacher and students is transformed into a more complex ternary turn-taking model,in which the teacher,students and the interpreter are in a dynamic interaction.Because of language barriers,the interpreter is the only person who knows or can easily use the discourse strategies of both languages,thus influencing the direction and outcome of the class conversation.The interpreter can adopt suitable turn-taking strategies,such as conveying turns,creating turns,ignoring turns and interrupting turns,to manage coordination,and deal with communicative dilemmas such as overlapping turns,silence,“miscommunication”,so as to realize the communicative intention of the primary interlocutors and achieve the class purpose effectively.With increasing exchanges between China and foreign countries,Sino-foreign cooperative classrooms can serve as a platform for international publicity.As vanguard on this platform,class interpreters should enhance their role awareness and communicative awareness.Analyzing class interpreting from the perspective of the Turn-taking Mechanism provides an empirical angle to theoretical researches.Furthermore,interpreters can solve communicative difficulties with turn-taking strategies during interpreting.It also proves that apart from studying basic translation techniques,interpreters have to develop their communicative competence,so as to better their interpreting performance in assignments.