A Report On The Imperial Palace’s Tour Guide Speech Interpretation

The Imperial Palace or the Forbidden City has witnessed the whole historical process of China’s ups and downs during the past 600 years since its establishment in the Ming Dynasty.It has extraordinary values and significance,not only for its magnificent architectural art and rich collection of cultural relics,but also for its special role in the studies of Chinese history and folk culture.With China’s increasingly opening to the outside world,the Imperial Palace has been arresting more and more international attention and thus attracting more and more foreign visitors.As the source material of this interpretation practice,the Imperial Palace’s tour guide speech lasts for one hour.The guided tour route starts from the Meridian Gate,follows the central axis of the Palace,and finally ends at the Imperial Garden.The content of the tour guide speech includes two major parts: one part is an introductory speech about the Imperial Palace’s architectures,cultural relics,history and humanities,which is standardized and elegant in verbal style;the other part is an interactive speech about the proper and permissible tourist behaviors in the Palace,which is somewhat spontaneous and colloquial.Accordingly,the communicative functions of the speech include informative function,directive function and vocative function.There are four difficulties in interpreting the tour guide speech of the Imperial Palace:(1)insufficiency in bilingual knowledge,which results in comprehensive and expressive error;(2)deficiency in cognitive knowledge,including extra-linguistic knowledge involved in the source material and in English culture,which constitutes an obstacle for misunderstanding or interpreting source material;(3)misinterpretation of the communicative meaning,say,the meaning in specific context;(4)misjudgment of the communication circumstance,which refers to the background and psychological expectation of specific tourists groups.In response to the above-mentioned difficulties,the present writer decides to take Interpretive Theory as the guiding theory of the present interpretation project,the first systematic theory on oral interpretation in history,which was proposed by Seleskovitch in 1960 s and further developed and perfected by Lederer later,in which a triangular model for interpreting activities was proposed creatively,which takes meaning transmission as the major task of oral interpretation.On the basis of such a “Triangular Model” theory of the interpretive school,this interpreting process of this project is divided into three steps:(1)source text understanding;(2)deverbalization;(3)information restructuring.Among them,the critical step is “deverbalization”,which is greatly significant for the interpreters on dealing with the obstacles in the process of interpretation.Under the guidance of the Interpretive Theory and based on the content,verbal style and communicative functions of Imperial Palace tour guide speech,the present writer chooses interpretive translation,communicative translation and textual translation as the interpreting principles and strategies of the present interpreting case.Among them,interpretive translation emphasizes the meaning equivalence on the whole instead of equivalence in the isolated linguistic units,which requires that interpreters adopt deverbalization on the basis of full comprehension of the source text meaning and then express such a meaning in the most proper form of the target language.Communicative translation advocates that the communicative effect and function of the translation version on its target audience should be equivalent to the effect and function of the source text on its audience,so it endows interpreters with adequate freedom to restructure language forms and information for a more fluent and impressive translation.Textual translation attaches importance to the overall comprehension and interpretation of the source text information,which requires that the interpreters,based on a full understanding of the source text information,restructure that information in a logical way familiar to the target audience so as to ensure the coherence and acceptability of the translation.