C-E Interpreting Of Discourse Markers In Keynote Speeches—From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

As a common linguistic phenomenon in people's daily life, discourse markers are widely applied in all kinds of language environments. As its name shows, discourse markers are markers at discourse level, which plays an indispensible role in semantic level. It is an important grammatical device in syntactic structure. Meanwhile, in terms of syntactic level, they usually function as representing the sequential, temporal and logic relationships within the utterance. At present, the studies conducted on discourse markers both abroad and at home are mainly from the perspectives of discourse study, discourse analysis, pragmatic function, cognitive-pragmatic study and construction of discourse and context, etc. In previous studies, detailed elaborations of the features and functions of discourse markers were analyzed, but few studies were conducted in translation, even fewer in interpreting.This research adopts a combination of quantitative and qualitative approach. Through a study on the discourse markers occurring in 15 keynote speeches by President Xi Jinping and their respective interpreting transcripts, it firstly adopts Fraser's categorization of discourse markers to categorize the discourse markers in both source and target discourses; secondly after a comparison of discourse markers in both source and target discourses, the author summarizes the number patterns of discourse markers in keynote speeches; finally, after observing the changed discourse markers, i.e. adding certain discourse markers in target discourse, omitting discourse markers from source discourse and shift discourse markers into another part of speech or into another categorization, the author concludes the respective interpreting strategies, i.e. amplification, omission and shift. This research is conducted under the guidance of relevance theory. From the perspective of cognition, it discusses the double roles of interpreter in ostensive-inferential communicative process. This research regards interpreting as a communicative activity, and elaborates how interpreter employ discourse markers to reach the optimal relevance.