Information Equivalence: A Perspective Of Pragmatics On Business Interpretation

With the fast development of the world economy and frequent exchanges among people, business activities are booming in various sectors including trade, finance, insurance, tourism, transportation, investment, etc., which are mainly conducted in the form of international conferences, trading exchanges and business negotiations. Business interpretation, which is mostly consecutive interpretation, facilitates smooth information exchange between the two sides. The author attempts to apply the methodology of pragmatics to the study of business interpretation so as to avoid information discrepancy and attain information equivalence to the most possible extent.This paper is composed of six chapters. Chapter One deals with the characteristics of business language and the importance of business interpretation. In Chapter Two, the author holds the opinion that interpretation is a typical form of communication which is firmly based on information theory. In the meantime, she explores Nida's translation theory and the concept of "equivalence", from which she derives "information equivalence", which is a matter of relativity in a broad sense. Chapter three mostly focuses on the categories of information, both lingual and extra-lingual, verbal and non-verbal, given and new. From the point of the complexity of information, the author further studies thereasons for information discrepancy with factors of different thinking patterns, different cultural backgrounds, individual knowledge and nature of language involved. In Chapter Five, the author elaborates on the pragmatic failures occurring in information transmission including information redundancy, information deficiency, vagueness of information and information distortion. The author takes a pragmatic approach to the study of business interpretation so as to avoid information discrepancy. Then comes the last Chapter that summarizes some criteria, techniques and steps in business interpretation on the basis of the previous study.This paper makes a tentative exploration of business interpretation with a view to finding better ways for interpreters to follow and hopefully improving the quality of business interpretation.