Report On Consecutive Interpreting At Seminar On Application Of Urban Rail Transits Under Relevance Theory

In August 2017,the author participated in the Seminar on Application of Urban Rail Transit for Developing Countries,2017 as interpreter assistant.Fifty-three members from 13 developing countries joined the seminar to study China9 s Urban Rail Transit technologies and explore the prospect of applying the technology in their motherland.The main challenges for interpreters are comprehension difficulties caused by accent and ambiguity and constraints posed by the unique features of source utterances when interpreting.Cognitive Principle and Communicative Principle,the two founding principles of Relevance Theory are instrumental in overcoming difficulties listed above and formulating qualified Interpretation in a highly-technical context with speakers from varied language background.Cognitive principle teaches interpreters to identify and interpret to the addressee information of optimal relevance from an array of language input so that the addressee can understand the interpreted text with the similar amount of effort as the addressee may need in understanding the source text who share language with the speaker.And communicative principle encourages interpreters to get rid of the constraints posed by certain unique expressions of the source utterances and produce free interpretation to meet communicative intentions.The author analyzes her interpretation recordings from the four perspectives,namely Ostensive-Inferential Mode,Positive Cognitive Effect,Optimal Relevance and Equivalence on Degree of Relevance and summarizes the merits and problems of the field interpretation so as to upgrade her interpreting capability for future studies under the guidance of Relevance theory.