Communicative Barriers And Coping Strategies In Guide-interpreting From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

The growth of tourism industry creates the demand for guide-interpreting, which is a service of providing instruction concerning travel to foreign tourists. Guide-interpreting, as the medium for tourists from various countries, plays an increasingly important role in modern society and gains more opportunities to develop nowadays. Therefore, it has been attached great significance to study by scholars worldwide. However, the research still remains the superficial level which only focuses on practice and experience but ignores the theoretical support. Thus, it is very necessary for scholars to broaden and deepen its theoretical research. Since guide-interpreting is a kind of intercultural communication and Relevance Theory has a strong power to explain communication, it is very natural and reasonable to employ RT to the study of guide-interpreting. Relevance theory, which was put forward by Sperber and Wilson, regarding the process of communication as an ostensive-inferential communication, has been applied to explain many linguistic phenomena such as grammar, translation, stylistic features, etc. This thesis provides previous studies home and aboard briefly, and then introduces some basic points of RT related to guide-interpreting including communication, optimal relevance principle and cognitive context, etc. Besides that, it analyzes intercultural communicative obstacles and coping strategies to overcome them based on the analysis of the process of guide-interpreting in the light of RT. The author holds that Relevance Theory put forward by Sperber and Wilson is a guidance of great value for the conduction of guide-interpreting. According to it. guide-interpreting is an ostensive-inferential process rather than merely a process of encoding and decoding. To obtain the optimal relevance in the practice of interpretation, an interpreter, who plays the role of both an information transmitter and an information receiver, should be familiar with the cognitive context of the speaker and the audience, so that he can infer and make manifest the informative intention of the speaker and achieve the fulfillment of communicative intention based on participates’cognitive environment. In addition, the guide-interpreter is also expected to transmit messages producing the maximum of contextual effect and costing the minimum of cognitive effort. The cognitive context used by an interpreter in his inferential process is extremely important to message transmitting. When choosing words and phrases in target language to express the pragmatic meaning, a guide-interpreter should pay much attention to the relevance of his interpretation, maximizing the rale between contextual effect and cognitive effort. In fact, the essence of guide-interpreting is a kind of cross-cultural communication. Under the guidance of Relevance Theory, the author of this thesis aims to analyze the communicative barriers and come up with practical coping strategies to avoid these barriers.The thesis is organized in five chapters including introduction and conclusion.In Chapter One, introduction begins with the research background. Then the purpose and significance of this study and the main problems to be discussed in this thesis are presented briefly as well.In Chapter Two, apart from the introduction to previous studies, the theoretical framework and research object of this thesis are introduced respectively. And main concepts and principles of RT including relevance and reproduction are described at length; definition and basic information of guide-interpreting are presented subsequently.Chapter Three employs Relevance Theory to the study of guide-interpreting. The process of guide-interpreting and the reasons for the formation of cross-cultural communicative barriers are discussed in line with Relevance Theory. The main object of this chapter is to make an analysis for the intercultural communicative barriers in guide-interpreting on the basis of the theoretical foundation of this thesis.In Chapter Four, several coping strategies for overcoming problems discussed in the former chapter are explained according to the optimal relevance principle including cultural analogy, cultural amplification, cultural transplantation, paraphrase, style alteration, text structure alteration, etc. At the end of this chapter, two principles for guide-interpreters to obey in the practice of interpreting are rendered briefly.In the last chapter, the concluding remarks are made.