C-E Consecutive Interpreting From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

The Forum on Dongting Biluochun Tea Industry took place in Tiger Hill,Suzhou on March 28th,2018.Themed by the development of Suzhou's Biluochun tea industry,it touches upon topics like the industry's status quo,Biluochun tea culture and its production techniques.The author conducted a simulated consecutive interpreting task for the Forum.Inviting eight speakers,the Forum is divided into three rounds of discussion.Each involves no more than three speakers who take turns to answer a host's questions with little interruption from others,so despite the great number of speakers,one interpreter alone can reasonably undertake the task.Speakers at the Forum show different styles which cause different difficulties for interpreting.Some speakers are quite fluent,but there are quite a number of technical terms in their speeches,so to understand their words requires knowledge in their field of expertise.Some other speakers are sometimes incoherent and illogical in their speeches,which makes it hard for the interpreter to comprehend.To sum up,major difficulties encountered in interpreting include mismatches of encyclopedic entries,figurative language,implicit logic,semantic redundancy and incoherent speech.To address the aforementioned difficulties,the interpreter adopted Relevance Theory in guiding the interpreting practice.Placing importance on realizing optimal relevance without consuming gratuitous effort,relevance theory helps the author convey the speakers' informative intention efficiently.The following interpreting strategies are proposed in this spirit.The strategy of supplementation adds information absent in the hearers' encyclopedic entries.The strategy of substitution replaces images alien to the audience with others commonly seen in English.The strategy of explication represents implicit logic in a clearer way.The strategy of omission leaves out redundant messages.The strategy of information restructuring converts sentence orders to deal with the problem of incoherence.It is expected that this report can be of referential value for the author's future interpreting practice and contribute one more case to study consecutive interpreting from the perspective of relevance theory.