Cultural awareness plays an important role in consecutive interpreting as each

country has their own culture and sometimes it appears to have misunderstandings
between cross cultures. To avoid unexpected misunderstandings, interpreter needs to
be the bridge between those cultures and help his or her clients to convey their
meanings. According to Brian Fox the director for Interpertation DG Interpretation
European Commission, if the interpreter just interprets word for word without having
the culture awareness, the computer can translate much more better. Therefore, his or
her role is that delivering the speakers' message from one culture to another one.
In order to convey the meaning effectively, interpreters need to get to know
more about their clients's culture, habits and the people. Mr Xu have said "The
interpreters usually encounter a wide range of topics, and they have to be both an
expert and an encyclpedia who know "everything of something and something of
everything" (2006). For example, if the interpreter travel with the tourists to foreign
country, they should prepare carefully by get to know about the features of the place
they will come before hand. As the result, the skill or technique for culture awareness
of interpreters is knowledge.
In the process improving cultural awareness, the first thing needed to have is a
right and active active attitude toward different cultures. In detail, they need to be
open-minded, flexible, be able to adapt and remove the ignorance and prejudice when
facing a new culture (Zhang, 2011). Another suggestion for interpreters to broaden
their understanding is that reading more about the target culture as much as possible.
They can read the newspapers, magazines, documentary materials, novels, etc. With
this in mind, they can gain considerable background knowledge. American
Psychological Education also recommend some other tips for cultural awareness,
notably, listening carefully by identify and focus on the main information that needs
conveying, avoiding insensitive comments, and being aware of colloquialisms, slang
terms and clich pharses that is culturally specific and confusing. As an illustration, a
Vietnamese interpreters has made mistake as interpreting that "You are a rat." instead
of "You were borned in the year of Rat."