On The Subjectivity Of The Interpreter At Government Press Conferences From The Perspective Of The Interpretive Theory

Since the reform and opening up, China has achieved rapid development in politics, economy and culture, as well as the ever-increasing international status. The exchanges and communications between China and other countries are getting more frequent. The transfer of various languages can’t do without interpreting. In the course of global information, press conference conveying message to the outside world has caught people’s eyes, among which government press conference has especially attracted people’s attention, especially the premier’s press conferences held by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during the NPC and CPPCC sessions. The media at home and abroad gather together putting forward questions for the premier, and the premier will answer their questions. Acting as the bridge of communication between the speaker and the media, the interpreter plays a significant role. Therefore, a lot of scholars have carried out researches on government press conference interpreting (GPCI).In recent years, there have been many studies on the press conferences during the NPC and CPPCC sessions, but they are mostly done from the perspective of interpreting strategies, the interpreting of words with Chinese characteristics, note-taking, quality assessment, etc. Few researches have been conducted in the subjectivity of the interpreter from the perspective of interpretive theory. In view of this, based on interpretive theory, this thesis firstly elaborates the definition, features and principles of GPCI, then analyzes the subjectivity of the interpreter at GPC by taking the interpreting of Premier Wen’s and Premier Li’s remarks at press conferences from 2003 to 2015 as a case study.There are several findings in this study. Firstly, due to time limitation, seriousness of the topics, the vast differences between Chinese and English, and the various backgrounds of the audience, the interpreter shall and must exert subjectivity by following the principles of faithfulness, formality and brevity, so as to achieve smooth communication. That is, the interpreter needs to fully comprehend the meaning of the speaker, get rid of the yoke of linguistic forms and focuses on the meaning of the original message, then reformulate the idea in an acceptable and appropriate way. What’s more, the subjectivity of the interpreter is realized at four levels, i.e. lexical level, syntactic level, logic level, and cultural level. At lexical level, the interpreter adds necessary words, omits unnecessary words and shift word class to realize the subjectivity; as for the syntactic level, the subjectivity of the interpreter is mainly manifested in the change of word order and shift of perspective; at logical level, the interpreter’s subjectivity is shown in the reprocessing of logic; at cultural level, the interpreter usually explains the culture-loaded words or adopts equivalents to transfer the cultural idea. At the end, the paper discusses the three factors restraining the interpreter’s subjectivity, namely the speech itself, the speaker and the audience presented, and the interpreter himself/herself.