Interpretation Project Peport For "Catastrophe,War And Terror"

This interpretation project involves the lecture interpretation from English to Chinese of’Catastrophe, War and Terror’, the28th lecture of an open course named Introduction to Sociology in New York University. The audience is composed of40voluntary students of different majors from some university in Hangzhou. Then, the interpreter conducts research on the interpreting process, especially about the treatment of cohesive devices in lecture interpretation.Based on the cohesion theories of Halliday and instructed by those of Zhuanglin Hu and Delu Zhang, this report focuses on the proper treatment of English cohesive devices in the lecture interpretation. The interpreter finds the uniqueness of English cohesive devices in the sociology lecture source text:the high frequency of personal reference used in class, particularly the first personal; the high frequency of verbal substitution and clausal substitution; the high frequency of nominal ellipsis; preferences for conjunction; rich and varied lexical cohesions, and frequent use of substitution and reference. With regard to the aforementioned features, the following treatments are adopted in the process of interpretation:literal interpretation or omission of the personal reference according to the context; substitution identification and proper replacement; restoration of omission according to the characteristics of Chinese parataxis; use of the corresponding conjunction to retain the original function; and adoption of equivalents for keeping lexical cohesions.To sum up, it is necessary to identify the proper use of cohesive devices and improve cohesive techniques in lecture interpretation. The experience drawn from this research is expected to shed light on interpretation in similar contexts.