A Study Of Cultural Vacancy In Chinese-English Interpretation From The Perspective Of Relevancytheory

This thesis studies cultural vacancy in Chinese-English interpretation from the perspective of Relevancy Theory (hereinafter referred to as RT). Due to the differences in historical backgrounds, customs and so on, some concepts in Chinese have no corresponding expressions in English at times, which is called cultural vacancy. The previous studies mostly focused on cultural vacancy in translating, and little literature has been found to study the cultural vacancy in interpreting.RT studies communication from the perspective of cognition, which focuses on an ostensive-inferential process between the two parties of communication, and the interpreting process includes double ostensive-inferential communication activities involving source language speaker, the interpreter and the target language audience. Therefore, RT is widely used in interpreting studies. According to the principle named "optical relevance" under RT, this thesis is devoted to the translation skills of cultural vacancy in Chinese-English interpretation, unfolded from the following three aspects:vocabulary vacancy, phrases vacancy and cultural discourse vacancy.This thesis is a qualitative study and devotes itself to a case analysis and the data are collected from the text of NPC and CPPCC Sessions’Press Conference by Premier Li Keqiang in 2013-2015. It is concluded that (1) when some Chinese vocabularies are little culturally-loaded words and easy to find optimal relevance, vocabulary equivalence interpreting is a good method, conversely, interpretation is used; borrowing interpreting is used in some culture-loaded Chinese words which can find corresponding words indicating the same or similar meanings in English; for the culturally-loaded abbreviations or terminologies, amplification and annotation is necessary. (2) some of the four-character Chinese phrases have similar expressions in English, so phrase equivalence method or literal interpreting is used; some Chinese four-character idioms contains rich national cultural characteristics which have no corresponding expressions in English, so interpretation is used. (3) cultural discourse include ancient prose, poems, proverbs and idioms, etc., some simple idioms and proverbs, so sentence equivalence method or literal interpreting is used.; interpretation is adopted in interpreting ancient prose and poems.Under the guidance of RT, this thesis comprehensively discusses interpreting methods of cultural vacancy in Chinese-English interpretation, and accordingly further enriches the studies of cultural vacancy in interpretation.