On Interpretation Of Premier's Press Conference During NPC And CPPCC Sessions From The Perspective Of The Interpretive Theory

With opening and reform policies and its entrance into WTO, there are more and more political, economic and culture exchanges between China and the rest of the world. China needs to know the world and vice versa. Press conference, characterized by directness and flexibility, is popular with people and has become a widely-used publicity method around the world.In recent years, the Chinese government holds international and regional press conferences of different kinds. Authentic speakers will publicly talk about the country's policies and important issues and affairs which draw world-wide attention, answering journalists' questions, explaining the Party's and government's stance, opinions and attitudes, introducing how things are going, providing with news and information, answering questions that people are concerning. Every March, the press conferences held by the Foreign Ministry during the National People's Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) draw more attention from the world.This does not only raise higher demand for interpreters, but also provides a new research field for interpreting studies. Thus, the subject of this thesis is official press conference interpretation (PCI). On one hand, interpreters are "bridge" for foreign journalists and speakers; on the other hand, the study on PCI is far from being enough. This paper, based on the Interpretive Theory, with the concept of "faithfulness" as its starting point, is to discuss and explore what "faithfulness" is, what criteria of "faithfulness" are and what methods the interpreters use in order to be faithful to the speakers at the press conferences during the NPC and the CPPCC sessions.The Interpretive Theory was established on the basis of observation and analysis of interpreting reality. Its starting point and research perspective are completely different from that of the linguistics-based translation theories. Its research subject is not linguistic elements but to explain how meaning is transferred. It is generally held that translating consists of two processes: comprehension and expression. However, the Interpretive Theory holds that translating should go through three processes: comprehension, deverbalization and re-expression. Among them, "deverbalization" is unique to the Interpretive Theory.In addition, the Interpretive Theory has its own explanation to "faithfulness". This theory emphasizes that translation is a kind of communicative activity; the translator's task is to convey information, not to translate the language; it is the whole text that should be translated, not the linguistic signs. Translation should be faithful to sense, and sense is a combination of style, connotation, information and some other elements. Fidelity is composed of three factors: author's/speaker's intention, target language and target readers. The three factors work together indispensably and cannot be isolated. If the translator only considers one of them, neglecting the other two factors, fidelity cannot be achieved successfully.The press conferences held during the NPC and the CPPCC sessions are usually held by the Foreign Ministry. The speakers are government leaders or deputies to the NPC. They announce and state the opinions, stance and attitude of the government or a certain Ministry, and answer questions from the journalists. The speaker represents the government or certain ministry. Therefore, they themselves are authoritative and the information released by them is comprehensive, accurate and authoritative. The direct audiences are mainly journalists both at home and abroad, and working personnel. The indirect audiences are the general public, mass media, and foreign governments and so on. The language used in these communicative activities is formal and accurate.Because of the characteristics of the press conference during the NPC and the CPPCC sessions, higher demands are raised to the interpreter's all-round quality. Besides language proficiency and extensive knowledge, the interpreter should also have a good mentality and high political sensitivity. Because the content of the interpretation often involves the country's interest and politics and it is communication between the government leaders and the general public, the interpreter is required to understand the speaker's intention accurately, without any exaggeration or shrink of the original meaning, and make sure to be faithful to the speaker. In the interpreting process, the interpreter often adopts such methods as integrating the main points, restructuring the sentences, semantic explanation and so on to achieve fidelity to the speaker.Through the research, the author comes to the following findings: 1) The concept of "faithfulness" advocated by the Interpretive Theory is a tolerant and dynamic one. It consists of three aspects: the author's intention, the target language and the target readers; 2) The interpretation of press conference has its own characteristics. "Faithfulness" can serve as a guideline to the interpretation; 3) During the interpreting process, in order to be faithful to the speaker, interpreters often employ six methods and they are: integrating the main points, cultural consideration, restructuring sentences, semantic explanation, logical processing, and adjustment of the manner of speaking; 4) "Faithfulness", "smoothness", "promptness" and "appropriateness" can work as tentative criteria to assess the interpretation of press conference.