A Study Of The Contextual Adaptation In Interpretation Of Political Speeches

With the continuous strengthening of the comprehensive power of our country and the improvement of international status,many international conferences are held in China every year.Xi Jinping frequently appears at these meetings and delivers important political speeches.Through his political speeches,Xi Jinping explains the concept of peaceful development as well as domestic and foreign policies of our country.Interpretation of Xi Jinping's political speeches have become an important bridge for the Western world to understand China.The process of interpreting political speeches is a dynamic process of contextual communication.In order to adapt to various contextual factors and accurately convey the speaker's intentions in the process of interpretation,the interpreter would inevitably encounter the problem of language choices.Verschueren puts forward Adaptation Theory from the perspective of pragmatics,and argues that the use of language is a continuous process of making choices driven by internal and external factors of language.Based on this,this thesis introduces Verschueren's view on context and analyzes the interpretation of Xi Jinping's four political speeches in 2017 from two aspects: adaptation to the linguistic context and adaptation to the communicative context.It discusses what contextual factors the interpreter adapts to during the process of interpreting Xi Jinping's speeches and how the interpreter makes choices and adaptations to achieve the contextual adaptation.The results of the study show that Verschueren's view on context in Adaptation Theory has a great theoretical and practical significance in interpreting political speeches.The successful interpretation lies in the full understanding of Xi Jinping's words and the proper adaptations.Considering the differences in culture and expression habits between China and foreign countries,the interpreter makes adaptations to the target language not only from the aspect of linguistic context,including the selection ofwords,cohesion and sequencing of sentences,but also from the aspect of communicative context,which contains mental world,social world and physical world.Besides,this thesis summarizes the interpreting strategies adopted to achieve the contextual adaptation in these four political speeches,such as substitution,amplification,omission,literal interpreting plus explanations,and so on.