A Study On Misinterpretations At Press Conferences From The Perspective Of The Interpretive Theory

In recent years, China has gained great improvements and progress in the fields ofeconomy and society, which bring China to a higher international status. More and morenations and peoples are curious about the reasons of China’s achievements, hence start topay attention to China. They want to know more about China. However, it is impossiblefor people to see a nation clearly and objectively only through one’s own eyes andunderstanding. Especially when a dispute occurs, speculations or misunderstandings canbring a troubled situation to a worse degree. Under such circumstances, press conferenceis needed.This thesis is based on the Interpretive Theory created by a well-known Frenchtranslation theorist——Danica Seleskovitch. The core contribution of this theory is thetriangle model, which divides the process of interpreting into three procedures, namelycomprehension, deverbalization and reformulation. Among these three procedures,deverbalization is the most important and innovative one.The Interpretive Theory is a great achievement in interpretation study. By now, it hasbeen broadly put into use in interpreting training and practice. Interpreters and translatorsoften follow the triangle model during press conferences interpretation or translation.With the appearance of this theory, the interpreting researches have been graded up to anew level and many translation theories have also got affected by it. Therefore, in theacademic field, studies and researches on the application of the Interpretive Theory havebeen conducted frequently, but only several theses are related to consecutive interpretingat press conferences and even less are about misinterpretations at press conferences fromthe perspective of the Interpretive Theory.Although misinterpretations at press conferences are inevitable and forgivable, thereis still the need to conduct a detailed research on this topic for two reasons. First, byanalyzing misinterpretations, reasons of mistakes can be figured out and improvementscan be made. Usually, the occurrence of misinterpretations during interpretation is mainlybecause of interpreters failing to comprehend source language, or interpreting in a wordby word way, or expressing ideas incorrectly. In a word, at least one part of the triangleinterpretive model goes wrong. After analyzing these mistakes, solutions will be offeredrespectively. Second, theses on similar topics are few and most of them only list excellent interpretations at press conferences as examples which are not clear and powerful enoughto arouse interpreters’ attention. Knowing right examples may not help interpreters toprovide correct interpretations, while having misinterpretations in mind can helpinterpreters avoid mistakes. Therefore, this thesis will mainly conduct a study onmisinterpretations at press conferences from the perspective of the Interpretive Theory.The whole thesis is divided into three parts, namely, an introduction, the main bodyand a conclusion.In the Introduction part, a general idea of this thesis is given, including the coretheoretical bases, research methods, reasons of choosing such a subject, and alsopurposes of this thesis.In the second part—the main body, there are three chapters:Chapter I works as a literature review, in which the core contents and concepts of theInterpretive Theory are discussed and previous studies and researches on this perspectiveare introduced. Besides, the criteria and contribution of the Interpretive Theory are alsomentioned.Chapter III firstly conducts a study on consecutive interpreting at press conferences,including features of press conferences and consecutive interpreting, criteria of pressconferences consecutive interpreting and reasons of misinterpretations at pressconferences, and then it analyzes some misinterpretations as case study.In Chapter III, three strategies and two suggestions are provided for interpreters toavoid misinterpretations during press conference interpreting.The last part is conclusion, in which the author summarizes the whole thesis. Bypointing out both the contribution and shortness of this thesis, the author expresses herhope that more studies on this subject can be conducted.