Message Conveying In Interpretation From The Perspective Of Cultural Presupposition:a Case Study

With the strengthening of her comprehensive national power, China’s international status has been enhanced and accordingly, the communication and exchanges between China and the outside world has become more and more frequent. As an important platform, the official press conference provides foreigners not only with a chance to know China’s state affairs, but also with a chance to learn China’s culture and the thinking pattern of the Chinese. Since the official press conference covers a wide range of topics, it poses great challenges to press conference interpreters in terms of professional knowledge, background knowledge, cognitive competence and psychological quality.This thesis attempts to discuss the accuracy of message conveying in interpretation from the perspective of cultural presuppositions, taking interpreting at the press conference with President Obama and President Hu Jintao for example. Firstly, it reviews the academic studies of press conference interpretation. Meanwhile, the author finds few literature talks about conference interpretation from the perspective of cultural presupposition. Following that, it introduces the definitions, forming reasons, characteristics, functions and classifications of cultural presuppositions and discusses the difficulties in interpreting due to the cultural differences. Finally, this thesis, taking the interpreting of the press conference with President Obama and President Hu Jintao for example, analyzes the effects of the interpreting strategies chosen by press conference interpreters on message conveying to deal with cultural differences encountered in press conference interpreting. Based on analyses, the thesis draws a conclusion that interpreting training should give emphasis to the cultivation of psychological quality and cultural awareness as well as language competence.In this study, the author argues that:first, cultural differences have great impact on interpreting quality, which can be studied in different perspectives; second, cultural presupposition theory can give a persuasive explanation and guide to the choice of interpreting strategies used by interpreters; third, interpreters should adopt flexible interpreting strategies to achieve the aim of accurate message conveying, just because of the differences in language and culture between Chinese and English; fourth, through elaborately analyzing interpreting cases and drawing inspirations, this thesis provides a new angle to interpreting studies and practice.