Consecutive Interpreting Strategies From The Perspective Of Thematic Progression Patterns

The Theme and Rheme Theory(T&RT) was first proposed by V. Mathesius(1939), the founder of the Prague School, to analyze the constituent structure of a sentence. The Thematic Progression Pattern(TPP) was first brought up by Czech linguistician Danes(1974a) to study the connection and relationship between sentences within a context.Through reviewing relative literatures,it is found out that TPPcan provide some strategies to interpreters in the process of consecutive interpreting. In this thesis, the author first analyzes and organizes the existing combinations of TPP and proposes a new combination which is more suitable to analyze consecutive interpreting based on the four existing combinations of TPP. The new combination is used to analyze Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s press conference transcript on March 13 th, 2014. The author confirms thethematic progression pattern of each paragraph and analyzes strategies interpreter used in the process of interpreting. Then the author summarizes interpreting strategies of each thematic progression pattern and concludes interpreting strategies of the whole transcript from the perspective of TTP. The result shows that interpreters tend to use the same TTP in their interpretation as that of the original text and would also use the sentence pattern of “there be” or inverted sentence to arrange their interpretation in some circumstances.