An Empirical Study On Register In Interpretation By Subject Matter

The practice of interpretation involves various aspects of language competence, background knowledge and interpretation techniques. For various topics of thousands of subject matters in interpretation, an interpreter may encounter different genre speaking distinctive vocabulary and language structure with different tunes and manners. In order to compare these discourses, in this paper I adopt for the most part Halliday's register concept that register is language in use, and his register analysis based on three aspects of field, tenor and mode. This paper, from the perspective of the features of interpretation, studies the relationship between register and interpreting with emphasis on the embodiment of register in interpreting discourses. Five parameters concerning register in interpretation language are drawn out. They are respectively lexical properties, grammatical and syntactic equivalence, tenor consistency, formal correspondence, and verbal or phonological choices.Some field interpretation records and other speech transcripts are taken as the research objects of this thesis, which are divided into three categories by subject matter according to the register hierarchy of the level of formality proposed by Martin Joos, who suggests that language could be divided into five registers of frozen, formal, consultative, casual, and intimate. The three groups of material in this paper are respectively extremely formal and serous public speeches from UN Security Council, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of PRC and the World Economic Forum, which fall into Category one; formal speeches of Deng Xiaoping and business negotiations, which fall into Category two; and discourses in focus group discussion for product promotion and tourist interpreting, which fall into Category three. By analyzing the language involved in these categories according to the five parameters proposed in this paper, it shows the possibility and significance of establishing register equivalence between SL and TL.After the analysis, a case study was presented applying the five parameters of register equivalence to analyze and evaluate three interpretations for a same SL speech made by three interpretation learners. Hopefully this paper could shed some light on the assessment, pedagogy and practice of interpreting.