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. 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.