On Pragmatic Failure In Interpretation: An Adaptation Perspective

With the frequent exchanges between countries in the world, interpretation has been playing a more and more important role in international arena. As a dynamic communicative activity, it involves a series of linguistic choices. But it's not the case that interpreters can always make the appropriate linguistic choice and that's why pragmatic failures occur. Pragmatic failure severely blocks the effective communication."Pragmatic failure"is a term first proposed by Jenny Thomas who published her Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failure in 1983. In this article, she classifies pragmatic failure into pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure. From then on, it draws attention from scholars at home and abroad.This thesis reviews what have been studied before in this field and finds out the defects of the researches. Then it makes a combination of the study of pragmatic failure and interpretation and adopts Verschueren's adaptation theory to provide a new approach to explore the pragmatic failure in interpretation. According to Verschueren, language use is a continuous making of linguistic choices with different degree of salience for the purpose of adaptation in his adaptation theory. And thus interpretation—a special form of language use, is a cross-cultural communication, which can be approached by Adaptation Theory. This thesis makes a systematic study of pragmatic failure in interpretation from the perspective of adaptation theory in four angles: contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability, dynamics of adaptability, and the salience of adaptation process, with a great number of examples. And some measures to reduce or avoid pragmatic failure in interpretation are suggested and implications and limitation of the present study are also proposed in the end.