Chinese-English Interpreting and Intercultural Communication

Chinese and English are the world’s largest languages, and the number of interpreter-mediated interactions involving Chinese and English speakers has increased exponentially over the last 30 years. This book presents and describes examples of Chinese-English interpreting across a large number of settings: conference interpreting; diplomatic interpreting; media interpreting; business interpreting; police, legal and court interpreting; and healthcare interpreting. Interpreters working in these fields face not only the challenge of providing optimal inter-lingual transfer, but also need to fully understand the discourse-pragmatic conventions of both Chinese and English speakers.

This innovative book provides an overview of established and contemporary frameworks of intercultural communication and applies these to a large sample of Chinese-English interpreted interactions. The authors introduce the Inter-Culturality Framework as a descriptive tool to identify and describe the strategies and footings that interpreters adopt. This book contains findings from detailed data with Chinese-English interpreters as experts not only in inter-lingual exchange, but cross-linguistic and intercultural communication. As such, it is a detailed and authoritative guide for trainees as well as practising Chinese-English interpreters.

Jim Hlavac is a senior lecturer in Translation and Interpreting Studies, Monash University, and a certified and practising interpreter and translator. He has authored or edited four books and has published widely in the fields of translation and interpreting studies, multilingualism, contact linguistics, intercultural communication, pragmatics and language maintenance/shift.

Zhichang Xu is a senior lecturer in the Linguistics and English Language programme of the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University and an associate editor for English Today. His research areas include world Englishes, applied linguistics, cultural linguistics, intercultural communication, language education, and self-translation studies.