Implications From Relevance-Adjustability Theoretic Approach For The Teaching Of Interpretation For Political Affairs

This thesis revolves about the implications we can draw from Relevance-Adjustability Theoretical Approach (RATA in short) for the teaching of interpretation for political affairs. RATA, which is a theory put forward by Professor Li Zhanxi on the strength of Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory and Verschueren's Adaptation Theory, made its debut in the domain of translation. However, people gradually applied it to interpreting.RATA is a new cross-cultural theoretical paradigm, in which interpretation is deemed as a relevance-seeking, ostensive-inferential process and a dynamically-adjusting process. The interpreter's processing of the upcoming information is a process in which he/she begins searching for relevance, constructing the contextual assumptions in his/her mind, understanding what contextual effects are intended in the context and forming a comprehensive hypothesis of the speaker's intended intentions. The interpreter's use of target language to convey the speaker's intentions is a continuous choice-making process in which he/she adjusts his/her choices to the audience, motivated by his/her different psychological aspects. His/her linguistic choices and pragmatic interpretation strategies must focus on conveying the speaker's intentions without putting the audience to unnecessary processing efforts in achieving the contextual effects in the interpretation intended by the speaker.Viewing from RATA, I extract some implications for the teaching of interpretation for political affairs with regard to the four roles the interpreter assumes, five prerequisites for being an interpreter for political affairs as well as the compilation of the textbook for the teaching of interpretation for political affairs, and some tentative strategies and suggestions to cope with the interpretation of specific Chinese political terms and culture-related expressions are put forward in a bid to improve future teaching of the interpretation for political affairs.