Consecutive Interpreting Process From The Perspective Of Sociolinguistics

This thesis is an attempt to discuss the process of consecutive interpreting from the perspective of sociolinguistics. The study of sociolinguistics focuses on the relationship and interaction between language and society. It maintains that language in nature is a means of social communication and varies in different social contexts, which are mainly determined by class, gender, age, ethnic identity, education background, occupation and religious beliefs, therefore the speakers have to grasp those social and cultural messages and adapt to different variations of language usage to gain the best effects of communication. This paper justifies that consecutive interpreting is a process of social communication through language divided into three phases: listening and comprehension, deverbalization/memory and production, during which the interpreter synthesizes both linguistic knowledge and extra-linguistic knowledge (social and cultural messages) to get across the meaning or sense of the source language to the target audience.As for the structure, the thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one is a brief introduction to interpreting. The second chapter analyzes the interpreting process through the explanation of Effort Models put forward by Gile and the Interpretive Theory of Seleskovitch and discusses major barriers encountered in this course. The third chapter explains the theory of sociolinguistics from three aspects and its relevance to consecutive interpreting. In the fourth chapter, the author analyzes each step of interpreting process from the perspective of sociolinguistics and summarizes the sociolinguistic model of interpreting. In the listening comprehension stage, the interpreter tries to understand the linguistic meaning and incorporate social messages beyond language to obtain the sense and at the same time stores it in his short-term memory. In the production stage, the interpreter involves social contexts and communication purposes in his choice of words and sentences to reformulate sense in the target language. Finally, the fifth chapter sheds some light on the implications and significance of social linguistics to consecutive interpreting research, emphasizing that it takes language competence, understanding of social and cultural background of the communicators and adjustability to various social occasions and communication purposes to be a good interpreter. This paper also suggests ways to improve the consecutive interpreting performance i.e., to expand linguistic and extra-linguistic knowledge so as to enlarge the interpreter's cognitive environment in listening comprehension and cope with cultural gap in production.