On Methods Of The C-E Interpretation At Press Conferences From Perspectives Of The Interpretive Theory

As one of the most influential theories of interpreting, the interpretive theoryinitiated by Danica Seleskovitch requires interpreters to take speaker’scommunicative intention, targeted audience’s expectation and current situation of theconference into account. Interpreters need to perform well in the three followingphases, which are comprehension, deverbalization and reformulation. One mistakeor flaw in those phases will lead to unpleasant performance. Guided by theinterpretive theory, this paper focuses on the different expressions of interpreters(performed by MTI students) in dealing with the same long and difficult sentences,poems and sayings as well as Chinglish expressions, which will help interpreters toimprove their performance rationally, thus put forward some constructive feedbacksfor MTI students and English majors.There are four experiments in this paper, a questionnaire for difficulties inconference interpreting, an experiment in interpreting long and complex sentences,one in interpreting poems and sayings, and one on identification and clarification ofChinglish expressions. The text applied in the experiment is a compound involvinggovernment officials’ speeches, TV shows and government reports. Data collectedand conclusions drawn from those experiments will be helpful for interpreters toimprove performance on the spot.Experiment one is to survey English majors’ the reflection on the obstacles toconference interpreting, approaches to these obstacles and their self-evaluations.Raw data collected from reliable questionnaires show that senior English majors bearprimary interpretation knowledge but are subject to limited interpreting methods,and a lack of conceptual knowledge, therefore a well-established theory is needed toguide their practice. These senior students acknowledge that long and complexsentences, poems and sayings and Chinglish expressions are challenging but find nosummarized solutions to them. Records of respective versions by all interpreters inExperiment two and Experiment three have been proposed and analyzed,interpreters’ performance with respective scripts been accessed separately.Experiment four focuses on the identification of Chinglish and revision to theseChinglish expressions. The data show that the interpreters are sensitive to Chinglishto some extent, but not sensitive enough. Thus the experiment is helpful to locate thedead zone of redundant Chinglish for MTI students, as well as to evaluate theirperformance and give suggestions to remove Chinglish in interpretation.