On The Subjectivity Of The Conference Interpreter From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Subjectivity is a philosophical concept,which mainly refers to the initiative and creativeness of the human reflected in the subject-object activities.Interpreter,as one of the agents in translation activities,traditionally has been supposed to be faithful to the source expressions and be invisible.With the professionalization and studies on interpreting,interpreter's subjectivity has been gradually recognized.Under the relevance theory,interpreting can be viewed as a communicative activity that involves two ostensive-inferential processes.The cognitive principle of relevance theory does not only reveal the law of human cognition;it also reveals the importance of cognitive environment in human communication.Therefore,this paper tends to study the interpreter's subjectivity from the perspective of cognitive environment.This paper adopted case analysis as research method,and collected the on-site interpreting videos of the two sessions' press conference in recent 4 years as the corpus.The author observed and compared the source and target languages,finding that they are not corresponding word by word.This research excerpted and transcribed those parts,and categorized them according to the interpreting strategies.The interpreter manipulates the conversation by the strategies like semantic extension,addition,omission of void words,change of personal deixis,and paraphrase of metaphor.This research will analyze the interpreter's subjectivity under relevance theory: the interpreter has the double roles of ostension and inference,how to adjust the interpreting strategy according to speaker and listener's cognitive environment so that the listener can employ the least effort searching for the optimal relevance to achieve the communicative goal.Additionally,this paper also discusses how the interpreter employs his/her subjectivity to interpret when there is cognition gap caused by culture gap,language gap,and situational gap.This paper consists of five chapters.In chapter one,the research background,significance,objectives and research contents will be introduced.Chapter two gives the definition of subjectivity and its research status in translation and interpretation.Chapter three introduces the relevance theory and its principle,and the features of the cognitive environment.Chapter four presents the interpreter's subjectivity by case analysis,and the situations that activate the interpreter's subjectivity.Chapter five concludes the research findings,limitations and implication.