Consecutive Interpreting Study From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Interpreting, as a special form of human communication, is to transfer information from one language to another, so as to make people from different language and culture backgrounds understand each other smoothly. With the deepening of globalization, especially with the development of China’s policy of reform and opening to the outside world, we are making frequent interaction in the field of politics, economy and culture with other countries. Therefore, there is a high demand for interpreting. In order to boost the interpreting industry and cultivate more high-end interpreters, many experts and scholars have done a lot of researches in both theoretic and practical studies of interpreting. Relevance Theory, put forward by Sperber and Wilson, regards the communication of different languages as an ostensive-inference activity, which provides the interpreting study a new cognitive perspective.This thesis, based on Relevance Theory and the interpretation of speeches made abroad by Xi Jinping, is aimed to explore some general principles to guide the consecutive interpreting of live speeches. In light of Relevance Theory, this thesis focuses on the comprehension process and production process of interpreting, and finds out that the interpreter acts a dual-role as the hearer and the speaker. On one hand, he/she has to comprehend the original speaker’s utterance according to the contextual assumption left by the speaker and search for the optimal relevance. On the other hand, he/she should take such factors as the target hearer’s cognitive environment, culture and background into consideration, make some appropriate adjustments of the interpretation in the aspects of lexicon, syntax and contextual effect, so as to produce an interpretation that is of optimal relevance, maximum contextual effect and with the least processing efforts demanded. This thesis, from the perspective of Relevance Theory, taking specific texts as corpus and combining theory with practice, is of practical significance to a certain extent.