On Zero Translation In Press Conference Interpreting From A Sociolinguistic Perspective

With the public’s growing awareness of social and political life, the governments of countriesand major enterprises as well as institutes are attaching great importance to press conferences,which can get the public informed and involved in key issues and major activities, and areholding much more in recent years. It is noteworthy that more than one language is beingused for press conferences, such as Chinese and English in China, due to a growing numberof participants with exotic linguistic and ethnic backgrounds. In this connection, interpreterswho provide language service for the press conference play a very important role, since thequality of the interpretation directly determines whether the target participants can take thespeaker’s speech correctly, which can further result in the wrong direction of public opinionsat the worst.Nevertheless, interpreting for press conferences is so challenging that on-site interpretingactivities including consecutive interpreting and simultaneous interpreting still cannot achievecomplete equivalence between the source language and the target language because of the gapbetween the concerned languages. In this respect, some difficulties can be properly eased inlight of “zero translation” theory proposed by Professor Qiu Maoru, backed up bysociolinguistic theories of linguistic relativism and cognitive restraints. Still, a clear definitionof “zero translation” is attempted to be made in order to differentiate it from “nonetranslation”.After an empirical analysis, how to apply “zero translation” to press conference interpretingas a technique and how to judge whether the practice is “zero translation” or merely “nonetranslation” is indicated, which will hopefully provide guidance for interpreters when theymeet with similar cases during a press conference.