A Study Into Interpreting Strategies Of Chinese Metaphors In Chinese-english Consecutive Interpreting From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Under the framework of relevance theory, this study examines interpreters’ interpreting strategies and related cognitive processes in dealing with Chinese metaphors at Chinese Premiers’ press conferences between 2009 and 2015. As a special communicative activity, interpreting involves double ostensive-inferential processes from the perspective of relevance theory. When confronted with Chinese metaphors, interpreters must go through these two ostensive-inferential phases as well. However, compared with literal expressions, metaphors will naturally inflict more processing efforts on the part of interpreters both in terms of conceptualizing and interpreting. Due to the cognitive nature of metaphors and communicative nature of interpreting activities, relevance theory is well-applicable to study Chinese metaphors interpreting since it combines cognitive science with human communication. After a careful examination, two interpreting strategies are revealed to be most frequently used: image-retaining and conversion. According to this study, image-retaining is helpful for those universally accepted metaphorical images while conversion is mostly used when there arises highly culture-bound or self-created metaphors. It is also found that these two interpreting strategies stand in complementary distribution for different metaphorical concepts but can also be in coexistence under the same metaphorical framework with similar however different metaphors.This research opens a window for people to gain a deeper understanding of interpreters’ cognitive processes in dealing with Chinese metaphors. The strategies proposed in this thesis also sheds light on future practice of Chinese metaphor interpreting.