Application Of Adaptation Theory In Court Interpreting

Court interpreting in China is attracting more and more attention with the ever-growing foreign-related cases,resulted from the rapid progress in globalization and China’s opening up policy.As a special type of interpreting,court interpreting has been studied from many perspectives,such as standardization,role clarification,system building,etc.Yet most of them have focused on the macro aspect of court interpreting,without much attention attributed to the concrete interpreting process.As pointed out by Verschueren,using language must involve continuous linguistic choices making,which also applies to court interpreters.Inspired by Verschueren’s adaptation theory,this thesis aims to conduct a research on the application of adaptation theory in court interpreting,based on the analysis on authentic criminal trial interpreting corpus,aiming to illustrate how court interpreters making language choices and adaptations and to offer some suggestions for court interpreting.Consisting of five chapters,this thesis explores the adaptation theory application in court interpreting.Through illustrating the background of the study,the first chapter sets the scene for the following chapters.Chapter Two provides a literature review,starting with the previous research conducted in the interpreting studies,especially in court interpreting,leaving the adaptation theory to next chapter.Chapter Three is devoted to a detailed discussion of the theoretical framework of this thesis— the adaptation theory,including its origin,various research angles provided and the application in relevant studies.Chapter Four relates to a case study of a real-life criminal case with court interpreting involved,and the author investigated the application of adaptation theory in the interpreting process.Chapter Five begins with a research summary and discussion,and then draws conclusions based on the previous analysis and research,trying to offer some useful suggestions on court interpreting practice,and both the limitation and prospects of this research are also presented.