A Study Of Cross-cultural Pragmatic Failures In Interpretation From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

When human being enters into the21stcentury, the exchange between China and othercountries is becoming more frequently than ever before. Globalization has become a keyword to describe the world situation nowadays. With the quick development of economy,science and technology, cross-cultural communication is playing a more important role inthe quick changing era and interpretation is also a vital part in communication amongpeople coming from different language communities with different culturebackgrounds． Interpreters are quite often ignoring the cultural and pragmatic factors whendoing the interpretation, which may bring about wrong decoding or incorrectcomprehension of the source language, or even the serious communication breakdown.As a bridge in cross-cultural communication, an excellent interpreter is supposed topossess cross-cultural communicative competence and cross-cultural awareness.Interpreters should pay more attention to the analysis of cross-cultural pragmatic failures inorder to improve their skills in the self-training part in interpretation.The innovation of this thesis lies in: the study of interpretation, for a long time, isconfined to language competence and interpretation skills, quite few studies are from theperspective of cross-cultural communication. Many obstacles in communication appearedbecause of the different backgrounds and different languages. A confused understanding ofthe background knowledge or using one culture to judge another may also bring aboutcommunication breakdown. This paper defines pragmatic failures, illustrates what ispragmatic competence and pragmatic failure, and analyzes the feasibility of usingFunctional Equivalence theory to analyze cross-cultural pragmatic failures. Then this paperuses a series of examples to analyze the failures caused by the different culturalconventions and in this part, it mentions two factors, one is stressing“Conventional Talk”and the other is the negative transfer of culture. The paper analyzes the cross-culturalpragmatic failures caused by the ignorance of cultural relevance, failures caused bydifferent thinking mode and failures caused by the orientation of individual culture. The paper tries to give some compensational strategies which aim to improve interpretationquality and make a little contribution in cross-cultural communication.