An Interpretation Report On The American Documentary Series National Geographic: Build For Destruction

This thesis is intended to report the process,theoretical guiding principles,remaining problems and their solutions of the present writer's practice of consecutive interpretation.The interpreted materials are selected from the two episodes,Tornado and Desert,of the American documentary series National Geographic: Build for Destruction.Of the two episodes,Build for Destruction: Tornado concerns how tornadoes are formed,what effects they could bring,how the tornado researchers risk their lives chasing tornadoes in hopes of finding the measures for reducing their damages;Build for Destruction: Desert is an introduction of the characteristics,distributions,causes and effects of the desert,and scientists' studies on the desert as well as a wide variety of adventurous cases in which the brave travelers launch a challenge to the desert by hiking across its scorching land and experiencing the desert life.The theme of the materials is about catastrophic natural phenomena which are a strange topic to the interpreter,making a high demand on the interpreter's linguistic and extra-linguistic knowledge as well as her language comprehension and expression skills.Considering this,the present writer's consecutive interpretation of the above-mentioned materials were guided by the theoretical principles of Effort Mode and Comprehension Equation,two branches of Gile's theory of Interpretation Mode.According Gile's theory of Effort Mode,consecutive interpretation has two phases.Phrase I: CI=L(Listening and Analysis)+N(Note-taking)+M(Short-term Memory Operations)+C(Coordination);Phrase II: CI=Rem(Remembering)+Read(Note-reading)+P(Production).Besides,Gile further puts forward the theory of Comprehension Equation: C(Comprehension)=KL(Knowledge for the Language)+ELK(Extra-linguistic Knowledge)+A(Analysis).Guided by Gile's theory of Interpretation Mode,the analysis of the interpretation practice case is conducted from the following three aspects:(1)Effort distribution analysis,which is conducted by exploring the appropriateness of the effort distribution to different tasks of Phase One(i.e.Listening and Analysis,Note-taking,Short-term Memory Operations and Coordination)and Phase Two(i.e.Remembering,Note-reading and Production),and some advice about effort distribution coordination is given in accordance with the errors discovered in this practice case.(2)Comprehension error analysis,which is conducted from three aspects,that is,linguistic errors occurring at phonetic,lexical,grammatical and semantic levels,extra-linguistic knowledge insufficiency problems such as geographical and pathological knowledge insufficiency and analytical errors concerning pragmatic and logical analyses.(3)Production error analysis,which is conducted from two aspects,that is,complete translation(e.g.formal and functional non-equivalence)and translation variation(e.g.inappropriate addition,deletion and adaptation).Some suggestions are put forward in response to the problems discovered in this case analysis:(1)strengthening listening skill training;(2)acquiring scientific note-taking method system;(3)strengthening memory training;(4)distributing efforts scientifically;(5)learning and grasping linguistic and extra-linguistic knowledge;(6)improving analytical ability.