Relevance, Adaptation And The Nature Of Oral Interpretation

The dissertation is a tentative pragmatic study on the oral interpretation process with the Relevance-Adaptation Model, which is based on the two important pragmatic theories: Relevance Theory by Sperber and Wilson and Adaptation Theory by Verschueren. As we have known, Relevance Theory elaborates the relevance principle in verbal communication and provides the interpreter internal mechanism of utterance comprehension and Adaptation Theory concretely describes the adjustability of context and language structure, which also provides sufficient theoretic base for the interpreter in the target language use.The Relevance-Adaptation Model combines the interpretive power of Relevance Theory and the concrete descriptive power of Adaptation Theory to establish an integrated pragmatic theoretical frame explaining verbal communication, complementing the insufficient description of specific language use of Relevance theory and the lack of theoretic interpretation of Adaptation theory. Thus the theoretic model can expound how the cognitive system of the interpreter works in comprehending the source utterance and reproducing it in target language in the interpreting process.The Relevance-Adaptation Model holds that oral interpretation is a cross-culture communicative process among the original utterance speaker, the interpreter and the audience with the interpreter at the center. The process is a dynamically adjustably inferential and ostensive process under the principle of relevance and adaptation. In the comprehending process, the interpreter adapts to the contexts from which he chooses the correct contextual assumptions to capture the communicative intention that the speaker intends to convey to the hearer, and in the reproduction process the interpreter adapts to the context to make linguistic choices of the target language at the different levels of the target utterance-building ingredients to convey the speaker's intentions to the listener. The process in which the interpreter continuously makes choices is characterized by variableness, negotiability and relevance-adjustability.The dissertation attempts to offer a new pragmatic theoretic model on the study of oral interpretation. It is hoped that the model can enrich the related theoretic study of oral interpretation and have some guidance in enhancing the efficiency of oral interpretation.