TY - CHAP
T1 - Competing narratives and military interpreters’ choices
T2 - A case study on China–US disaster-relief joint military exercise
AU - Ouyang, Qianhua
AU - Xu, Qiliang
N1 - Publisher copyright:
© 2021 selection and editorial matter, Binhua Wang and Jeremy Munday; individual chapters, the contributors
PY - 2020/10/22
Y1 - 2020/10/22
N2 - Notwithstanding the insightful inquiries into translators’ decision-making through the discourse analysis approach, research on interpreters’ decision-making mechanisms has been focusing more on the cognitive regime due to the evanescent nature of the activity. Social and cultural context that weighs heavily on interpreters’ choices has been largely brushed off. This study, through the lens of narrative theory and bringing in different layers of narratives as a more omnipresent context of the interpreting process, aims to unveil the narrative activators of interpreters’ choices at critical points where major deviations between the input and output occur. The case the research looks at is the midterm consultation conference of the China-US disaster-relief joint military exercise. Public, conceptual and meta-narrative on China-US relations and military relations are first surveyed with reference to reports on government portals and mainstream media in the two countries. A corpus of the transcribed recordings of the aforementioned military event is then built for the analysis. It is found that in most cases, choices of interpreters are activated by immediate verbal input with reference to the closest narratives. However, when the verbal input competes with the held-true public, conceptual and meta-narratives, interpreters may refer to the latter in their decision-making. Implications on interpreters’ roles are also discussed in this research.
AB - Notwithstanding the insightful inquiries into translators’ decision-making through the discourse analysis approach, research on interpreters’ decision-making mechanisms has been focusing more on the cognitive regime due to the evanescent nature of the activity. Social and cultural context that weighs heavily on interpreters’ choices has been largely brushed off. This study, through the lens of narrative theory and bringing in different layers of narratives as a more omnipresent context of the interpreting process, aims to unveil the narrative activators of interpreters’ choices at critical points where major deviations between the input and output occur. The case the research looks at is the midterm consultation conference of the China-US disaster-relief joint military exercise. Public, conceptual and meta-narrative on China-US relations and military relations are first surveyed with reference to reports on government portals and mainstream media in the two countries. A corpus of the transcribed recordings of the aforementioned military event is then built for the analysis. It is found that in most cases, choices of interpreters are activated by immediate verbal input with reference to the closest narratives. However, when the verbal input competes with the held-true public, conceptual and meta-narratives, interpreters may refer to the latter in their decision-making. Implications on interpreters’ roles are also discussed in this research.
UR - https://www.routledge.com/Advances-in-Discourse-Analysis-of-Translation-and-Interpreting-Linking/Wang-Munday/p/book/9780367822446
U2 - 10.4324/9780367822446-6
DO - 10.4324/9780367822446-6
M3 - Chapter
SN - 9780367421755
SN - 9780367548162
T3 - Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies
SP - 64
EP - 81
BT - Advances in Discourse Analysis of Translation and Interpreting
A2 - Wang, Binhua
A2 - Munday, Jeremy
PB - Routledge
CY - Oxon; New York
ER -