On Optimal Relevance In Business Interpreting

The report is written on the basis of an actual business interpreting practice in2017 China Liaoning Investment and Trade Fair co-sponsored by Liaoning Provincial Government and the Bank of China on June 7^th,2017.According to the Relevance Theory,proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson,it's believed that communication is an ostensive-referential process,and its aim is to seek optimal relevance.Optimal relevance means that an utterance can produce adequate contextual effects with minimum efforts.To understand and reproduce informative and communicative purposes of the speaker,the interpreter should choose a proper context,combining the information of the speaker and cognitive environment of the interpreter,infer the communicative purposes.In the reproduction phase of the target language,the interpreter should take into consideration the cognitive environment of the audience,and express the communicative purposes of the speaker with words that have the optimal relevance.Business interpreting is a linguistic communication activity with high relevance and certain purposes.Communicators always intend to find the optimal relevance between utterances and contexts,that is,they try to understand an utterance adequately within an effective cognitive context,while optimal relevance can help the interpreter find a better contextual effect and achieve communicative purpose.In this report,the author briefly introduces the interpreting task,describing the background information of this practice and related pre-interpreting preparation work.Then,the author analyzes in detail from the perspective of Relevance Theory such problems as information loss,correction,misinterpretation and repetitive information occurred in the interpreting process,and gives explanations about reasons behind these problems,which mainly includes inadequate linguistic language,imbalanced effort distribution,lack of background information and etc..Based on the relevance theory,the author starts from the perspective of strengthening optimal relevance in informative and communicative purposes and puts forward four coping strategies to deal with problems in the interpreting process:removing vocabulary barriers,repeating direct information,increasing turns of communication,and free interpretation,hoping to ensure correctness of source language and help the audience find the optimal relevance.Lastly,the author makes a summary and self-assessment on this practice in the hope of providing certain enlightenment for future interpreting task.