The Realization Of Interpersonal Function In Chinese-to-English Consecutive Interpreting At Government Press Conference

This thesis tries to analyze consecutive interpretation under the theory of interpersonal function, which plays a major role in maintaining relationship and communicating others in speaking. The material selected is the Chinese-to-English consecutive interpreting at a press conference held by State Council Information Office (SCIO) of People’s Republic of China (PRC). This thesis devotes most of the efforts to making a contrastive analysis of interpretation at SCIO press conference and the speech made at a American press conference held by White House. It explores how interpersonal functions are presented in both discourses, and tries to find similarities and differences in mood system and modality system in particular.Through the analysis of the mood system, the thesis finds that at the SCIO conference, the speaker plays a major role in providing information while the journalists are relatively passive. The different relationships between the speakers and the journalists determine most of the differences in mood system and modality system. The Chinese interpreter’s use of short sentences is an effective way to convey the facts and information when translating the declarative mood. Through the analysis of the modality system, this study finds that the interpreter also uses more median-scale operators, particular more "will"s. In addition, the interpreter does not follow the Chinese Speaker’s use of low-scale modality operators and omits most of them and makes some mistakes, which shows that he does not give due attention to the use of modality.Theoretically, the study extends the application of systemic functional grammar to the evaluation of consecutive interpretation at the press conference. It proves that the analysis of the realization of interpersonal metafunctions is an effective way to interpret the relationship between the speaker and listener, and assesses the quality of translation from the perspective of realizing the original discourse’s communication purpose.