A Study Of Sociopragmatic Failures In Interpretation: A Relevance Perspective

Interpretation is a communicative process which faithfully and orally transfers the information from one language to another. However, the sociopragmatic failures in interpretation, which result from the interpreter's deficiency of cross-cultural awareness and cross-cultural pragmatic competence, can not be easily perceived by the interpreter and may result in misunderstandings which even lead to the interruption of the communication. This thesis intends to analyze the phenomenon of soicopragmatic failures in interpretation from the perspective of Relevance Theory and aims at accounting for the reasons of sociopragmatic failures and the inference process in interpretation with sociopragmatic failures.Firstly from the angle of ostension, the author analyzes the two intentions (the communicative intention and the informative intention) of the speaker of the source language which are transferred through her ostensive behaviors. When the speaker of the source language produces a stimulus, she is intending to make both the communicative intention and the informative intention manifest to the interpreter at the same time. Then from the angle of inference, the author investigates the process of how the interpreter decodes the stimulus which is produced by the source speaker, that is, how the interpreter infers the source speaker's informative intention with the mutual cognitive environments of both the source speaker and the interpreter. Next, the author analyzes the inference process of the hearer of the target language with the expectation of relevance. Since the interpreter automatically expects that there is optimal relevance in the stimulus of the source speaker, he or she will infer the informative intention of the stimulus with such a kind of expectation of relevance. There are two aspects during the process of interpretation: the inference process of the informative intention of the source language and the expression of the informative intention of the source language. It will directly influence the effect of interpretation whether the informative intention is achieved or not. With a large number of examples, the author has made a relative detailed analysis of the reasons of sociopragmatic failures, the inference process and the expression process of the interpretation; sociopragmatic failures mainly occur in the following three different conditions: the utterances with polite formula, the words with culture-load information and the sentences which have synonymous structures. In interpretation, the achievement and the proper expression of the source speaker's informative intention are the key points in achieving a successful interpretation, and it is the same case with the cross-cultural competence and cross-cultural awareness of the interpreter which are essential to avoiding sociopragmatic failures in interpretation. Through this study, we can make a conclusion that the phenomenon of sociopragmatic failures in interpretation can be better accounted for within the framework of Relevance Theory.