A Study Of Sermon Interpretation From The Interpretive Perspective

The Chinese– English sermon interpretation of Christian church is a relatively new and interesting field of interpretation study. Different from most speeches, sermon is targeted not only at informing the listeners, but more importantly challenging the mind, inspiring the soul and creating response. To achieve such an effect, the sermon interpreter needs to be resourceful and tactical.The interpretive theory exerts strong influence on both the researchers'and practitioners'communities. This paper embarks upon a preliminary analysis of sermon interpretation from the interpretive approach, and reveals that cognitive complements and deverbalization are essential in comprehension and reformulation of the sermon. The present study exploits rich interpretation data from the Sunday messages at Silicon Valley Christian Assembly. Qualitative method is adopted in the case study; detailed analysis is made in regard to the biblical word correspondence, cognitive complements, rebalance of the explicitness in target language, deverbalization and reformation, as well as personal techniques employed in sermon interpretation. The various techniques found in data analysis testify the necessity of deverbalzation and creativity in reformulation in sermon interpretation. The implications from the research shall also prove of value to researches and interpreting practices in fields other than sermon interpretation.