Approaches To Redundancy In Interpreting

Language is used as a main medium to convey information which, as the vehicle of meaning, should be accurate and effective, whereas it is often difficult for the sender to convey it truly and effectively to the receptor in daily communication. Even in many normal cases people tend to give information more than actually needed to ensure that their message is normally comprehended. The information beyond the minimum amount actually needed is called "redundancy" in linguistics, which is, as a rule in language use, often referred to as deadword, repetition, overlaboration, etc. Although not well accepted or advocated in communication, they are all there in daily use. R.R.P.Hartman (1972: 189) said that language often avails itself of the rule of redundancy to transmit information more than actually needed. English linguist Randolph Quirk (1963: 303) pointed out that the ratio of redundancy in English is as much as 50% while Xu Shenghuan (1984: 2-3) calculated more than 60-70% according to the formula made by C.E. Shannon, an American scientist and the founder of Information Theory, which shows clearly that redundancy plays an important role in language interaction.Interpretation is a special interlingual communication while explaining (deciphering) can be regarded as a most appropriate representation of its interpretive function. What needs to be stressed is that explaining or deciphering is susceptible to redundant words and sentences, which is termed "entropy" in Communication studies. The "entropy" roots in the unpredictability of the contents and is required by the effectiveness for information transmission, similar to daily conversation, for the receptor's easy understanding. Therefore it is not unnecessary for some redundant words or sentences to be used in interpretation communication. Otherwise some obstacles will unavoidably occur in the interpretation.Theoretical studies on oral interpretation have up to now been blooming over the world and some experts have turned to substantial researches on interpretation, most of whom, nevertheless, focus on the interpretation techniques, interpretation teaching strategies, materials for practice, etc. What they intend to do is just to provide guidance for interpreters on how or how well to do interpretation, but few of them deal theoretically with the issues behind the traps that certain interpreters tend to fall into or the delusions that often dominate interpreters in practice.On the basis of his interest in redundancy and the study of interpretation theories, the author intends to probe into the potential relations between the two from the multidimensional perspectives to give some tentative solutions to the problems involved.The thesis consists of six parts: In the introduction of this thesis redundant information and interpretation are briefly introduced, showing that redundancy is a common phenomenon inevitably existing in the information transmission. Interpretation, as a fashion of information communication, is of course not exclusive.Chapter 1 offers the Interpretive Theory. The production of interpretation is just the process of information expression during which the strategy of interpreting or explaining is frequently adopted by interpreters. The effective transmission of information often needs the proper explanation by interpreters and redundancy knocks with explanation. Therefore, redundancy is unavoidable in interpretation. Beginning with the introduction of the interpretive theory, this chapter illustrates the thinking process of interpretation, the sense in interpretation, interpretation unit and sense unit, serving as the warm-up for the later discussion of redundancy.Chapter 2 focuses on the theme of the thesis-redundancy. After the definition of redundancy, the author further discusses how to keep reasonably the balance between redundancy and economy, and then probes into the relations between redundancy and language, in turn elucidates the characteristics, classification, functions of redundancy and factors affecting the redundancy of language, holding that redundancy in interpretation is a special case unavoidable in communication. Chapter 3 is the core of the thesis. The author attempts to give tentative solutions to redundancy in interpretation with many examples from practice from such perspectives as language structure, rhetorical repetition, language transfer, information theory, cross-cultural communication.Chapter 4 probes further into the tactics specific for different cases to deal with redundancy in interpretation, aiming to provide guidance to specific interpretation practice and help reach effective communication.The last part of the thesis concludes that the features of interpretation determine that the focus should be on the information rather than the forms, and that redundancy is unavoidable in the transformation due to the difference of language structures.