A Study Of Press Conference Interpretation-From The Perspective Of The Functionalist Approach And The Interpretive Theory

The research object of the present thesis is the press conference interpretation (PCI), which is more appropriate to be considered as a kind of inter-cultural communicative activity with certain obvious purposes to achieve due to its political characteristics of international exchanges. Starting from a new perspective of analyzing the parties involved in PCI, the study attempts to prove the feasibility and the guiding sense for the combination of the functionalist approach and the interpretive theory in this regard with explanatory and empirical research method.The research begins with a detailed introduction to the functionalist approach, the interpretive theory, and PCI through related literature reviews. Next, the thesis proposes the existence of a special party—the initiator, who is usually the government agency or the country, in the PCI process instead of the interpreter, the addresser/source-text producer and the audience/target-text receiver alone by analyzing the involving parties in the entire interpreting process. The interpreter, acts as the clue and the most dynamic factor in PCI, gets the translation brief from the initiator before the conference even starts and then does the interpreting job for the addresser and the audience who share different cultural backgrounds by taking the guidance of the translation brief as the keynote for interpreting performance.The following findings have been achieved through the studies: the Skopostheorie of the functionalist approach is able to explain well the relationship between the interpreter and the initiator, that is, the interpreter has to complete the interpretation according to the translation brief in order to achieve the Skopos of this communicative activity, which can be reflected in such peculiar aspects as political stances and cross-cultural communications. On the other hand, the interpreter is not asked to unconditionally subordinate to the translation brief. Instead it is the interpreter's responsibility and competency in the PCI process to choose the detailed or specific strategies and techniques to accomplish the intended purposes in accordance with the actual situations in terms of the cultural differences between the addresser and the audience and so on, where the interpretive theory stands well.