A Cognitive Context Approach To Pragmatic Failure In Business Negotiation Interpreting

Business negotiation is the important segment of international trade. The successful business negotiation largely depends on whether or not the interpreter can accurately grasp the pragmatic intention of the negotiation parties. In business negotiation interpretations, such factors as cultural differences and interpreters’ ability often lead to pragmatic failure, which have been approached by scholars, home and abroad. They have reached some agreements, but the reasons for pragmatic failure and the coping strategy in business negotiation interpretations remain controversial, and especially little literature has been found that systematically discusses these questions from perspective of the interpreters’ cognition of negotiation parties’ mental world.Cognitive context is the knowledge structure in which pragmatic factors have been conceptualized and schematicized. The utmost feature of cognitive context is the emphasis of the interlocutors’ psychological state and cognitive process. Therefore, this thesis attempts to approach this issue from the perspective of cognitive context, specifically devoted to the following questions:(1) what are the cognitive factors causing pragmatic failure in business negotiation interpreting? (2) what interpreting strategies can be adopted to avoid pragmatic failure in business negotiation interpreting?This thesis is a qualitative study and the data are collected by observation from the real texts of business negotiations. The conclusions include that:(1) the factors leading to pragmatic failure in business negotiation are lack of requisite cognitive context for the communication, failure to construct a new cognitive context, mismatch of cognitive context; (2) the advisable strategies avoiding pragmatic failures of business negotiating interpreting include fostering the interpreters’ contextual cognitive competence and the dynamic adaptation to context and linguistic choices.This thesis approaches the causes of pragmatic failure in business negotiation interpretation from the perspective of cognitive context, which promotes business negotiation interpretation on one hand, and to some extent, extends the application of cognitive context on the other.