A Study On The Diplomatic Interpreting Strategies For Political Affairs From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Since China has more interactions with the rest world in21st century, diplomacy for political affairs has been a driving force for other diplomatic activities like economic, cultural and sports communication. Political diplomacy relates to our national image, territorial integrity and national policies, so political diplomacy is the basic and critical part of all diplomatic matters. And there is no doubt that higher demands are set for interpreters on politically diplomatic occasions.Different from other kinds of interpretation, interpreting for political affairs is characterized with grave topics, sensitive language, policy-based contents and vague expressions. What’s more, interpreters on such political occasions act as both a message transmitter and a diplomat. Considering all these features, the thesis invents a new way to discuss the interpreting strategies for political affairs based on relevance theory.From the concept of verbal communication, interpretation for political affairs is actually an ostensive-inferential process. Inferential process refers to listening and comprehension, during which, interpreters try their best to find out the optimal relevance from the original text. While ostensive process means the language output, during which interpreters should deliver the interpretation with optimal relevance. Then, the author explores the standards for a successful political interpretation under the guidance of optimal relevance and concept of context, that is, pursuit of optimal relevance from the SL speaker and pursuit of optimal relevance for the TL recipient.According to the above standards, the author discusses the interpreting strategies for political affairs by analyzing speeches or statements of our national leaders or their spokesmen on different political occasions. The discussion is conducted in two ways: improvement of listening and comprehension and improvement of language output. As for listening and comprehension, long-term and short-term preparation is indispensable for interpreters to well catch the optimal relevance provided by the speaker. Long-term preparation includes accumulation of linguistic and encyclopedia knowledge, and short-term preparation mainly contains familiarity about the topics, national policies and positions on relevant issues as well as the speech habits of both sides. Only in this way would optimal relevance be achieved between interpreters’contextual assumptions and speakers’ expected contextual effects. And for language output, interpreting methods, like explanatory interpretation, omission, preservation and syntactic transformation, are discussed in a comprehensive way. By means of these strategies, the interpretation would not only conform to the expressional patterns of the TL, but also reduce the processing efforts for the audience to well understand the informative and communicative intentions by the SL speaker.With appropriate use of these interpreting strategies, China’s voice can be precisely transmitted around the world.