A Study On Interpreting Process From A Relevance-adaptation Perspective

Interpretation as a cross-cultural communicative act, has naturally received attention from scholars in different research fields. With the development of the Cognitive-Pragmatics, a new perspective for the interpretation research has emerged.The present research is a pragmatic exploration of the interpreting process from the perspective of R.elevance-Adaptation approach, which is cultivated on the basis of Sperber's and Wilson's Relevance Theory and Verschueren's Adaptation Theory.The Relevance-Adaptation approach holds the view that oral interpretation is a cross-cultural communication among the speaker, the interpreter and the audience with the interpreter at the center. Under this framework, the interpreting process is deemed as both a relevance-seeking, ostensive-inferential process and a dynamically-adapting process.In order to give a better account for the interpretation, this thesis divides the interpreting process into Utterance-Comprehending Communicative Process (UCCP) and Utterance-Producing Communicative Process (UPCP). But there is a necessity to point out that in the actual course of oral interpretation the two sub-processes are constantly intersecting; in other words, the interpreter's comprehending and producing seem to go hand in hand constantly.In UCCP, the interpreter endeavors to mobilize his cognitive resources available to choose the correct contextual assumptions in the hope of capturing the speaker's informative intention and communicative intention. The task for the interpreter lies in correct processing of the optimal relevance to the speaker's communicative intention. In UPCP, guided by this optimal relevance, the interpreter consciously makes linguistic choices at different levels of the target utterance-building ingredients to convey the speaker's intentions or to manipulate his informative intention by ensuring the cognitive consonance of the receptor audience. This continuous choice-making process is characterized with variableness, mediation and adjustability.The thesis attempts to offer a new pragmatic theoretic perspective on the study of oral interpretation and propose some main strategies coping with cultural-specific rendering in interpretation. It is with sincere hope that this thesis will serve as an enrichment of the related theoretic research on oral interpretation and render some guidance in enhancing the efficiency of interpreting practice.