A Pragmatic Study Of Discourse Markers In Diplomatic Interpreting

Diplomatic interpreting often takes place in press conferences, international meetingsand negotiations that are related with national interests in politics and economics. During theinterpreting process, discourse markers can be important devices in connecting segments andguaranteeing successes in communications. Therefore, what roles discourse markers play inutterances and how to make best of their functions so as to serve interpreters’ output are to besolved for both diplomatic interpreting studies and practices.Drawing on insights from previous studies, this study proposes a relevance theoreticalframework, based on which the author tries to figure out the pragmatic functions of discoursemarkers in diplomatic interpreting, how interpreters employ them to realize their pragmaticfunctions and reasons why interpreters apply discourse markers to their outputs. In order tosolve the above questions, this study firstly gives a working definition of discourse markersbased on previous definitions and adopts Ran Yongping’s categorization of discourse markers.In this way, discourse markers in Foreign Minister Press Conference during the NationalPeople’s Congress and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference from2009to2013are divided into eight types. In accordance with the observation of collected data, it has beenfound that the number of discourse markers in target texts is more than the number ofdiscourse markers in source texts. In addition, discourse markers are not simply added intosource texts by interpreters. Various modifications have been made such as deletion, additionand reorganization. Inspired by these findings, detailed analysis of discourse markers withinthe theoretical framework is carried out.In accordance with the case studies, pragmatic functions of discourse markers indiplomatic interpreting can be drawn from two aspects. On one hand, discourse markers playimportant roles in achieving coherence in diplomatic interpreting, which is explained fromtwo perspectives: managing the flow of information and highlighting implicit relations. Onthe other hand, discourse markers can serve as communication strategies when they are used to fill in pauses and build optimal relevance between the target texts and contexts. Withrespect to methods that interpreters adopt to realize such pragmatic functions, three methodshave been concluded which are deletion, addition and reorganization. In addition, reasonsleading to employment of discourse markers have been summarized too, one of which is thedifference existing between Chinese and English.To sum up, it is believed that this research can reach two goals. Theoretically, it canmake some contributions to interpreting studies as well as studies on discourse markers.Practically, this study can arouse interpreter trainees’ attention to the importance of discoursemarkers in discourses.