A Study Of Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting Strategy From The Perspective Of Chesterman’s Memetics

Memetics, as an emerging theory, gains wider and wider attention from various areas. From the perspective of memetics, interpreting can be seen as a process of memes’ cross-cultural replication and transmission. Memetics can affect the thinking mode and translation idea of interpreters from aspects. It does have guidance to the interpretation practice and teaching. However, such research or study is still limited in some specific areas, and few ones can be found in interpretation. This thesis is a fully attempt of the application of memetics to interpretation.Memetics is a newly springing up subject to explain the rule of culture evolution based on Darwin’s Evolutionary Theory. The core of memetics is meme, a factor similar to gene. The study of memes shows its infecting power and appeals to scholars from different fields ever since it was born. Chesterman combines it with translation and proposes translation memetics. Chesterman holds that the core concepts of translation memetics are value memes, norm memes and strategy memes. Value memes govern norm memes and strategy memes are the ways of following norm memes. This thesis combines these concepts with press conference interpretations, because press conference interpretation is a special writing style which can be seen as a memepool or memeplex. The process of interpreting is a process of transmission and replication of memes, during which there are four stages, assimilation, retention, expression and transmission. That is to say, during this process, infected by the original meme, the interpreter will decode the memes, then encoding the memes into the target language vector to infect the target host. When encoding, the interpreter (the first host) seeks to conform to some norm memes and adopts some kinds of strategies to meet the norm memes and to spread the memes as efficiently as possible.This present study is a qualitative research. The first part is introduction, which presents the research background, research purpose and the structure of this thesis. The second part is literature review. Firstly, the author illustrates the core concepts of memetics and translation memetics, such as the processes of memes’replication and schema of memes’transmission, the value memes, norm memes and strategy memes. Secondly, the author reviews the former researches of this theory from home and abroad, and finds that translation memetics does not touch upon the study of interpretation. In the third part, the author introduces the research methodology and presents the research questions as well as the data collection of this study. The thesis employs the press conference interpretations of Premier Wen and the Foreign Minister Yang as the subjects for the study. The author searches the internet and selects seven pieces of audios of press conferences. The seven pieces contain four pieces of Premier Wen Jiabao’s press conference interpretation in the year of2009,2010,2011,2012and three pieces of Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi’s press conference interpretation in the year of2009,2010, and2012. The author transfers them after listening and selects40examples from the transcripts of the press conference interpretations. The fourth part is the core of this thesis. The author illustrates the analysis of the above-mentioned transcriptions of the press conference interpretations. The analysis is divided into two parts, one is on interpreting strategies, and one is on norms. The analysis to interpreting strategies contains three parts at different levels, namely the syntactic/grammatic level, the semantic level and the pragmatic level. Using memetic theory, these memetic strategies are discussed one by one. After analysis, the author finds out the memetic strategies that are suitable for the interpretation and points out those not fitful. Chesterman points out that, it is norm meme that governs the strategy memes. So it is necessary to give an analysis of norm meme. Then according to the norm theory, the author gives a general understanding to the concepts and also uses a few examples to illustrate their application to press conference interpretation.This thesis is a tentative study to the memetic strategies in interpretation. It’s unavoidable to have some limitations. In the last part of the thesis, the author makes a summary to the whole passage, finding out the major answers and proposing some useful suggestions to avoid the same shortcomings in the future study.