On Interpretation Strategies Under Cohesion Theory

Nowadays, we live in a world of globalization of more and more frequent communications. Leaders and high-level officials around the world often deliver addresses on the international occasions. Carrying great weight during the process, interpreting is in urgent need to overcome the language barriers for people of different cultures, so as to enhance mutual understanding. However, the requirements for interpreters have also been raised. Interpreters need to get across addresses correctly, not only literally but also as a whole text. Most speeches are well-organized and enjoy a strong cohesion. Upon comprehension, interpreters should take a full consideration of cultural diversity, linguistic habits and ethnic characteristics, transfer appropriately to achieve a natural representation into the target language, hence the topic of this thesis as to the cohesion in interpreting.The thesis takes cohesion theory as theoretical framework, which is proposed by Halliday and Hasan in 1976 and supplemented afterwards. The thesis focuses on discussion of categorization of cohesive devices by the couple. Cohesive devices fall into the categorizations of structural and non-structural cohesion. Parallelism, theme-rhyme structure and the information structure constitute structural cohesion, while reference, substitution and ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion belong to non-structural cohesion. The author selects President Xi’s international public speeches in the last year or two as the corpus for research. Guided by cohesion theory, the thesis highlights features in political speeches and conducts a contrastive analysis of Chinese and English cohesive characters. Additionally, the author also picks out cohesion shifts adopted by the interpreter, further analyzes the causes and effects of such practice, and explores its enlightenment on research and teaching of interpreting in the future. Up to now, some fundamental results have been made in domestic interpreting researches, which are limited and calls for deeper and further studies, and much less researches on the application of cohesion theory. Therefore, based on the previous researches, the author combines cohesion theory with interpreting, in the hope of enriching interpreting study.