An Analysis Of Premier Press Conference Interpretation From The Perspective Of The Interpretive Theory

Premier press conference held in March every year has become an important window for the rest of the world to understand Chinese political, economic and for-eign policies and so on. Interpretation serves as a bridge at this press conference and its quality directly affects China’s image and its foreign publicity. While it’s the interpreting strategies that have a bearing on the quality of interpretation.In order to guarantee the quality of interpretation and accurately convey the meaning of the source language, it’s necessary to choose proper interpreting strate-gies. The interpretive theory believes that interpretation is a communicative activity whose focal point is to extract and convey meaning or sense. This is in line with the characteristics and standards of Premier press conference interpretation. Therefore, the interpretive theory plays a guiding role in this type of interpretation.The interpretive theory believes that there are three steps in translation:com-prehension, deverbalization, reproduction. The core of the theory is that what the interpreter tries to convey is not the linguistic meaning of the source language but the sense and idea the speaker wants to express. Only through deverbalization, can sense be formed, which links the source language and target language and therefore reaches the goal of trans-language communication.Guided by the interpretive theory, the thesis is aimed to analyze basic inter-preting strategies by studying premier press conference interpretation after NPC and CPPCC sessions in2012and2013. There are four main strategies concluded from the study cases:free interpretation, transformation of sentence structure, discourse interpreting combined with logical analysis, and interpretive information addition.1.Free interpretation. This is also called interpretive translation, whose purpose is to pursue equivalence of meaning/sense.2. Transformation of sentence structure. English and Chinese belong to different language families with distinct sentence structures, which doesn’t affect the conveyance of sense. This strategy aims to con-vey the same sense in different structures.3. Discourse interpreting combined with logical analysis. The interpretive theory believes that interpretation is a process of interpreting the sense out of the source discourse by mobilizing interpreter’s cogni-tive knowledge. Without discourse, interpretation, only at the word level, fails to fulfill successful trans-language communication.4. Interpretive information addi-tion. The equivalence of sense is the first principle of translation. Because of time limit, the speaker does’t explain all the information. The omitted common sense information for the domestic listeners may not be common for the foreign listeners. Therefore, the interpreter should add the omitted information for the sake of foreign listeners so as to achieve the equivalence of sense.Under the guidance of the interpretive theory, with these four strategies in mind, sense of the source language can be accurately and fully conveyed, and quali-ty of interpretation improved.