Manipulating And Interpreting Of Vague Language In Consecutive Interpreting

The wide employment of vague language in communication has evoked increasingly interest home and abroad. Ever since mid-1960s, a lot of investigations have been made by linguists and scholars, in terms of various fields as phonetics, semantic, syntax, pragmatic, etc. Yet systematic analysis of vague language in still urgently needed in consecutive interpreting, as vague language is frequently used by speaker and interpreter for some purposes. The present study, which mainly belongs to a qualitative study, focuses on manipulating and interpreting of vague language in consecutive interpreting, with data collected from speeches, press conferences, economic negotiations, under the instruction of Pragmatics and Interpretive Theory.The thesis consists of four chapters. General introduction is given in Chapter 1. Firstly, a historical overview of vagueness research is stated home and abroad, while vague language is then defined in its broadest sense, focusing on its nature of "indeterminate interpretation". Then vague language is analyzed in consecutive interpreting, illustrating vague language is manipulated as a dispensable tool in interpreting session. Further more, as vagueness is one feature of interpreting language, and the importance of vague language is protruding as speaker takes it as a communicative strategy, and interpreter utilizes its vague nature lightens working load and guarantee quality of rendition.Chapter 2 first illustrates how vague language is perceived and understood by the aid of "context" in pragmatics. Under the guidance of Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle and Face-threatening Act, speaker manipulates vague language to guarantee sufficient information and completion of communication in a relative pleasant atmosphere.Driven by motivation, the speaker chooses to manipulate vague language in order to realize communicative effects: enhancing the flexibility, improving the appropriateness of expression and creating special effects. The actual manipulation of vague language constitutes the main focus in Chapter 3. Being a communicative strategy, vague language relies on various linguistic choices to realize its function, in terms of word level, sentence level and discourse level, each category is further classified and illustrated with data collected. And special attention should be paid to the appropriate use of vague language.Chapter 4 provides a comparative study of vague language between China and west, unveils why vague language is used more often in China than that in the West. Then the study focus moves to different interpreting techniques interpreter should take when interpreting vague language, under the instruction of Interpretive Theory. Through observation of the data, we generalize two ways of interpreting: passive approaches and active approaches. And the interpreting quality can be evaluated by listeners' satisfactory.The present investigation enables us to draw the conclusion that the tactful manipulation of vague language not only ensures a more effective and appropriate communication by speaker, and also lightens interpreter's workload and improves interpreting quality.