China Daily's Role On Press Conference Interpreting From A Skopos Approach

Conference interpreting,the specialized profession of cross-language and cross-culture services,proves the highest level of all kinds of interpretation tasks. Among all kinds of conference interpreting,press conference interpreting is widely used in modern society,especially when a country has some important issues,key policies and regulations to popularize and to announce.For instance,Beijing Olympic Committee organized hundreds of press conferences to brief on the preparation work, the competition organization and the Olympic Village operation to thousands of media from home and abroad,all of which need qualified interpreters.In recent years,there comes an increasing demand for high-level interpreters to work on such occasions.At present,there are several higher education institutes in Chins setting up postgraduate courses in interpreting like Beijing Foreign Studies University,Guangdong University of Foreign Studies,Shanghai International Studies University,Xiamen University,etc. Those higher education institutes have already formed their own curriculum system and teaching characteristics,which,however,still need to be improved compared With the increasingly expanding interpreting market and the longer history of interpreter cultivation in the west.China Daily,established in 1981,proves the only English newspaper of national level in China,committed to "helping the world know more about China and the country's integration with the international community".The newspaper,often called the "Voice of China" or "Window to China",is regarded as one of the country's most authoritative English media outlets and an important source of information on Chinese politics,economy,society and culture.It adopts the way of news translation to present some of its articles,editorials,comments and columns,introducing various aspects of China.The thesis will take a skopos approach to explain that China Daily plays an important role on press conference interpreting and that interpreters may effectively cut the burden of memorizing,take notes,reconstruct the information and deal with finding proper English version of distinctive Chinese words.The skopos theory, proposed by Vermeer,advocates some principles translators need to abide by,namely, the skopos role,the coherence rule and the fidelity rule.Nord,as the representative of skopos theory in its further phase of development,makes supplements to Vermeer's theory and proposes the faithfulness rule,that is,the model of "function plus faithfulness".Here in the thesis those three rules is used to illustrate the close relationship between China Daily's English and press conference interpreters' responsibilities on site.China Daily's role and significance on consecutive interpreters are also analyzed.The author of the thesis has worked as journalist and news translator for China Daily and interpreter,both simultaneous and consecutive,for some international events and press conferences.She may,through combining her own working experience and materials and statistics collect from real practice to explain China Daily's role on press Conference interpreting and to suggest that China's interpreting training institutes make full use of the newspaper in their curriculum system and apply it in all-round way in the interpreter training courses.Those institutes need to better its training system in an effective manner,so as to improve the student interpreters' competence for the high demanding job.