A Pragmatic Study Of Hedges In Business Interpreting

This paper is a pragmatic study of hedges in business interpreting. It is a qualitativestudy based on Grice’s Co-operative Principle Theory and Conversational ImplicatureTheory. Two types of business interpreting--business negotiation interpreting and businessconference interpreting are chosen to be analyzed and two interpreting recordings have beencollected as the analytical materials, one of which is from the author’s own interpretingexperience, the other from the Chinese Commerce Minister Gao Hu-cheng’s pressconference on March7th,2014. The former is used to analyze the business negotiationinterpreting, while the latter is for analyzing the business conference interpreting.This paper argues hedges use in business interpreting based on previous studies ofbusiness interpreting, hedges, co-operative principle and conversational implicatureadvanced by such famous scholars as Grice, Levinson, Gile, Wu Tie-ping, He Zi-ran, ZhangQiao, etc. Therefore the theoretical framework of this study has been built on the furtherstudy of the classifications of hedges, four maxims of co-operative principle andconversational implicature theory. Through the analysis of hedges, the author has got twomajor findings. One is that the frequency of hedges use under co-operative principle theoryand conversational implicature theory is different: shields are more often used based onco-operative principle theory, while approximators are more often used based onConversational Implicature Theory. The reason is that there is a difference between this twotheories. Approximators will change the truth value of a sentence while shields will not.Another major finding is that hedges choices in business interpreting should take the realsituation into account.The author draws conclusions: firstly, different types of hedges used differently indifferent types of business interpreting in the premise of real implicature should be paidmore attention to by interpreters, shields are more often used under Co-operative Principle while approximators are more used under Conversational Implicature Theory; secondly, thereason why there is a difference between this two theories is that approximators will changethe true value of a sentence while shields will not; thirdly, the method of hedges choice inbusiness interpreting should consider the real situation: for more standard and officialoccasions, shields are more used than approximators.As it is the first time for the author to conduct research in this field, there is no denyingthat this study can only act as a basic and preliminary research of hedges in the field ofbusiness interpreting, and the author deeply feels that it is vital and essential for usinterpreters to do further research on hedges in business interpreting.