The Role Of Context In Interpretation Process-From Pragmatic Dimension

As a newly-emerging interlingual, trans-national, cross-cultural discipline, interpretation has drawn more and more attention from researchers and interpretation educators in recent years. There is a growing trend in interpretation research: Interpretation has been gradually divorced from conventional translation studies with more dependence upon other research paradigms and approaches such as psycholinguistics, cognitive science, experimental pragmatics, etc. With their contributions, a brighter vista of interpretation research has unfolded itself in recent years. Nevertheless, it has long been neglected that interpretation is an interlingual, cross-cultural communication activity that entails a large variety of factors influencing the interpreting process and quality. All these factors have a joint effect on the complexity of interpretation, which addresses more integrated approaches and more broadened research mind.By integrating with the theory of communication, this paper intends to explore the contextual factors and their functions during each stage of interpretation process from the perspective of pragmatics. The notion of context has been the topic in the researches of semantics, which focuses more upon the categorizations of contextual variables, and less upon the dynamic relationship between contextual factors and utterances (oral discourse). Even when falling into the pragmatic research scope, context has always been marginalized as the borderline product of the research. Thus the research on context in semantics and pragmatics is almost paralyzed in guiding practical use of context in a particular field.By saying pragmatics, it should not be understood as the conventional concept of pragmatic studies. In a broader sense, the paper intends to discuss the practical issues and phenomena that are involved during the interpretation process. Interpretation process roughly falls into three stages: the preparation before interpreting, the act of interpreting (including listening and utterance comprehension of the interpreter), and finally the interpreting performance and its effects under the influence of contextual factors at each stage. Context in this paper is elaborated in three forms in accordance with three interpreting procedures: the context of situation, the cognitive context as studied in the Relevance Theory, and triple contexts within international communication pragmatics research scope. Because contextual factors are studied on the basis of different research paradigms and approaches to achieve different research goals, contextual factors may overlap in aforementioned contexts. By studying context in interpretation process from the perspective of pragmatics, the paper attempts to provide guiding principles for evaluating interpretation quality and training interpreters.