On Cross-cultural Pragmatic Failure Of Proverbs In Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting

With the increasing communication between countries, interpreting has become arising industry. However, it is not as new as translation. In Nuremberg Sentence,people used interpreting for the first time. And in recent years, it has experienced aquick development. Due to the differences in places and cultures, people’s thinkingmode is totally different from one to another. Therefore, the quality of interpreting isaffected. When two languages or more languages encounter, it may be difficult forpeople to understand. What’s more, it may result in misunderstanding, followingcommunicative failure. And cross-cultural pragmatic failure is a significant reason.Pragmatic failure was first put forward by Jenny Thomas in her book Cross-culturalPragmatic Failure, published in Applied Linguistics in1983. in her opinion，pragmatic failure was created by failing to understand what the speaker means. In herbook, she still differentiated that there were two kind of pragmatic failure:pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure. This thesis introduces someresearches and achievements in this field, explain briefly what is pragmatic failureand communicative competence, and analyze the four main cause of pragmatic failure.Then the author presents some examples on cross-cultural pragmatic failure ofproverbs which easily appear in the process of consecutive interpreting and somemeasures to reduce the failure in cross-cultural interpreting. Only when one has adeep understanding of cultural differences, adopt the appropriate measures andcultivate one’s communicative competence can the cross-cultural communicationproceed effectively and successfully.