The Practical Significance Of Relevance Theory To Chinese-English Consecutive Interpretation

The Relevance Theory (RT), a cognitive pragmatics theory, put forward by Dan Sperber and Denirdre Wilson in1986can deal with human communication. According to the theory, communication is an ostensive-inferential process. The speaker expresses his informative and communicative intention clearly, while the listener chooses the appropriate context by combining his own cognitive environment with the speaker’s information and makes inference about the speaker-intended assumption. As consecutive interpretation (CI) is a kind of communicative activity, RT can also interpret it.This thesis tries to summarize the practical significance of RT to CI by analyzing relations between them. It introduces the fundamental concepts of RT, characteristics of CI and then interprets CI from the perspective of RT, which provides theoretical support for the following chapters. The focus of the thesis is to analyze the practical significance of RT to CI:preparations before interpretation and interpreting strategies. According to RT, related preparations include preparing knowledge and information of specific interpretation tasks. Knowledge includes encyclopedic knowledge, professional knowledge and terminology. Task information should be prepared in the light of specific interpretation tasks. In this case, high quality of interpretation can be guaranteed. The major interpreting strategies interpreters can adopt are addition(adding explanations or logical words to ensure fluency), omission(omitting repeated words or redundant parts) and paraphrase(translating the speaker’s communicative intension). Interpreters have more choices but they should choose strategies flexibly based on conditions. They should strive to obey the principle of "faithfulness and expressiveness" in interpreting.