C-E Consecutive Interpreting For Government Press Conferences: The Relevance-theoretical Approach

With China’s opening up to the outside world, Chinese to English (C-E)consecutive interpretation has become increasingly instrumental in enabling othercountries to have a better understanding of China. Serving as a bridge between twodifferent languages and cultures, interpretation is in nature a form of verbalcommunication which is mainly considered as an inferential process of the humanmind by the relevance theorists. Their cognitive pragmatic point of view can also beused to examine the process of interpreting.This thesis has applied the relevance theory to the study of C-E consecutiveinterpretation. By analyzing the interpretation of China’s government pressconferences, the author puts forward four practical interpreting strategies: the use ofdiscourse markers, explicitation of the encyclopedic information, the use ofdemonstrative reference, and manipulation of English syntax.The application of the relevance theory also proves that the context plays animportant role in ensuring the target audience to correctly recognize what the speakerhas said. The above mentioned strategies serve as effective tools for interpreters toconstruct the appropriate context to facilitate completion of their tasks.