Interlingual 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.

This uniquely interdisciplinary collection of essays derives in part from a two-day international conference held at Heriot-Watt University in November 1999 and conceived as a critical forum for the discussion of the concept of interaction. The collection satisfies a continuing need for interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary research in the humanities and stems from an awareness of the growing currency of interactionist theories in several fields and the need to make a critical contribution to such theories and related concepts such as intersubjectivity and dialogism. Rather than advancing an apologetic view of interaction as something given, the contributors carefully consider and challenge commonly held epistemological and theoretical assumptions relating to the interaction concept. Interaction, if it is to be a meaningful concept, must be seen in terms of its modes (e.g. linguistic, media-based), units (language, logic, communication), objectives (understanding, consensus, stability) and fields of operation (face-to-face interaction, translation, social codification). This collection is intended to offer a provisional response to the question posed by one of its contributors, ‘What does it mean today that communication as the mechanism of social co-ordination has itself become complex?’. It means that erstwhile certainties of meaning transmission, stability, duality or dichotomy, identity and difference can be challenged and theoretically modelled in new contexts. Interdisciplinarity is one means by which to illuminate this complexity from several sides in the pursuit of theoretical blind spots in the field of critical communication studies. The book will be of particular interest to researchers and students in communication theory, linguistics, translation studies, logic, social psychology, discourse studies, European Studies, philosophy and semiotics.

Combining perspectives from discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, the second edition of this popular textbook provides students with an up-to-date overview of the field of intercultural communication. Ingrid Piller explains communication in context using two main approaches. The first treats cultural identity, difference and similarity as discursive constructions. The second, informed by bilingualism studies, highlights the use and prestige of different languages and language varieties as well as the varying access that speakers have to them.

This selection of 30 contributions (3 workshop reports, 27 papers from 14 countries) concentrates on intercultural communication in its broadest sense: themes vary from dissident translation under the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines and translation as a process of power in the 3rd world context to drama translation and the role of the cognitive sciences in translation theory. Topics of current interest such as media interpreting, news translation, advertising, subtitling and the ethics of translation have a prominent position, as does the Workshop 'Contact as Conflict' which discusses the phenomenon of the hybrid text as a result of the translation process. The volume closes with the EST Focus debate on thorny issues of Methodology, Policy and Training. The volume demonstrates clearly the richness and breadth of the topics dealt with in Translation Studies today along with its complex interaction with neighbouring disciplines.

Translation and interpreting studies and intercultural communication have so far largely been treated as separate disciplines. Translational Action and Intercultural Communication offers an overview of a range of different theoretical and methodological approaches to examining the hitherto largely ignored connection between the two research strands. Drawing on three key concepts ('functional equivalence', 'dilated speech situation' and 'intercultural understanding'), this interdisciplinary volume attempts to interrelate the following thematic strands: procedures of mediating between cultures in translational action, problems of intercultural communication in translational action, and insights into intercultural communication based on analyses of translational action. The volume features both contrastive papers and papers which investigate communicative events in actu. The analyses presented deal with a variety of genres and types of interaction, including children's books, speech acts in dramatic text, popular science and economic texts, excerpts from intercultural university encounters, phatic talk, toast giving and medical communication.