Case Study On The Conciseness Of Interpretation Under The Interpretive Theory

In the modern international context of IT application, the press conference, asan effective channel for information dissemination and communication, is playingmore and more important roles in spreading information, especially during theannual Premier’s press conference held by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in theNPC and CPPCC sessions, which is extremely eye-catching. The interpreter, as themediator between the addressor and the audience, is playing an active part.Therefore the interpreter, the one who is supposed to make the audience understandthe addressor’s intention in a correct and concise way, has been regarded as thestandard by the general public. However, nowadays studies related to pressconference interpretation are extremely rare, among which dealing with theinterpreting skills is hardly seen. Interpretive theory, in a sense, serving as aninfluential interpreting theory, is of instructive significance to the interpretingskills at the press conference. Interpretive theory asserts that interpreting is a kindof communicative behavior with the purpose of conveying sense. There are threestages in the process of interpreting, namely, comprehension, deverbalization andreformulation.Based on interpretive theory, proceeding from the discourse analysis of thelatest ten years of Premier’s press conference and interpreter’s role identification,this study proposes the most significant principles for the interpreting should beconciseness, which is determined by its own features. On the one hand, from theperspective of the audience, simple words and sentence structures are much easierto understand. Frankly speaking, easier comprehension is more important thanbeing concise and the interpreters should not sacrifice the meaning for conciseness.On the other hand, from the perspective of the interpreters, dividing a longsentence into couples of small ones gives them some more time for thinking whiledoing the interpreting, which is also regarded as a useful interpreting skill.Interpreting is considered as a difficult and multi-task process, while theinterpreters are cognitively heavy-loaded. An important interpreting skill is toensure the language output with high quality by means of adhering to theconciseness principle. Of course, interpreting should not sacrifice the real meaningfor conciseness; both principles of faithfulness and conciseness should be takeninto consideration and put in the first place. This study offers a few somewhat immature remarks to solicit other people’swise and mature opinions and hopes to offer some references for futureresearchers.