A Study On Interpreting Strategies From The Perspective Of Nord’s Text Typology Theory

As the communication bridge, interpreting plays a vital role in the press conference. Thus the study of press conference interpretation is of significance. However, most researches on press conferences interpretation just provided some interpreting skills without exploring the strategies from the perspective of a certain theory. Nord’s Text Typology Theory, which consists of text types and two basic translation strategies, can provide theoretical basis and methodological guidance to the study of press conference interpretation.So in this study the author explored the press conference interpretation by analyzing the text types and the interpreting strategies, which provided a new angle for the study of the press conference interpretation.The study explored the press conference interpreting strategies from the perspective of Nord’s Text Typology Theory. The author firstly gathers some audios of Premier Wen Jiabao’s annual press conferences held during the NPC and the CPPCC session in China on the internet. Then the author listens to the audio materials and selects4press conference interpretation audios as transcribed targets, namely, the interpretation audios from the year2009to2012. Then the researcher transcribed the oral discourse into written texts. Under the guidance of Nord’s Text Typology, the researcher analyzed the types of the texts and found that the texts were of different types, including the expressive, the referential, the appellative and the phatic type. Then some extracts were selected and analyzed as samples, to be specific,14samples with different text types were chosen in total. Then the researcher compared the original speeches and the interpretation texts at the lexical, syntactic and rhetorical levels, and lastly inducted the interpreting strategies, using Nord’s term-documentary and instrumental translation strategy. According to the study, most texts belonged to the expressive and referential type and a minor part of texts were phatic and appellative. Moreover, the interpreters adopted the documentary translation as the major interpretation strategy, although in some cases the interpreter combined the instrumental and documentary interpretation strategies, or partly employed the documentary interpretation. Meanwhile, the study provided some implications for interpreting teaching. That is. in the interpreting course, the idea of Nord’s Text Typology Theory can be introduced to develop the trainees’theoretical sense of text function, text types and interpreting strategies. In the practice, the trainees can be instructed to pay attention to the predominant functions of the texts, after analyzing the text types, the trainees can employ corresponding interpreting strategies, documentary or instrumental interpreting, to gain the communicative goal. Therefore, according to the observational study, it can be seen that Nord’s Text Typology Theory is instructive and meaningful to the exploration of the interpreting strategies of the press conference and the interpreting teaching.