The Interpretation Of Culture-loaded Expressions In Political Speeches: From Relevance Theory Perspective

Globalization as well as international crises and disasters spur the need for cross-lingual verbal communication for myriad languages.This is reflected in going intense research activity in the field of speech interpretation.On the one hand,early efforts have seen a tremendous performance improvement via technique advance in dealing with speech translation problems caused by controlled conditions,restricted vocabularies and strong domain limitations.On the other hand,however,a baffling,communicative problem such as culture-loaded expressions poses both practical and theoretical challenges.Culturally divergent ways of communication not only hinder our reaching a mutual understanding on the individual basis but even causes conflicts on the national basis.Since explanation of culture-loaded expressions has to be sought in the frame of language theory to account for social-cultural determinant of meaning and use,in this paper,the writer,under the guidance of Relevance Theory,intends to focus on culture-loaded expressions in political speech interpretation practice.Here,four different sources of cultural misunderstanding in the type of ancient prose,proverb,idioms,common sayings and internet buzzwords are to be reviewed and discussed.Preceding to the case analysis and strategy drawing,the tackling samples for this study are extracted from the speech delivered by President Xi Jinping,Premier Li Keqiang and Foreign Minister Wang Yi in 2017.In culture-loaded expression,there are almost always at least two cultures,two voices and two languages,being expressed at the same time.In order to address the challenges of translating the culture elements,the writer firstly is to set up Relevance Theory as foundation and then examines the different key components of those culture-loaded expressions.The writer will also explore fully the provision of cultural interpretation in the Chinese political speech setting in order to find out the linguistic features on way to integrate the cultural elements in the translation process.The main results of this work include the employment of Relevance Theory to the chosen case studies and the approaches and strategies to the Chinese leader’s political speech interpretation.Based on the results,it is expected that those coping strategies to the five types of culture-loaded expression in political speeches will contribute to the future study in the field of Interpretation and Translation.