A Practice Report On Chinese-English Interpretation Of The Commentary Of The Sichuan Museum

This report is based on the interpreter’s work experience of interpreting the commentary of the Sichuan Museum for an American visitor.In the museum tour,the docent introduced three permanent galleries: Gallery of Bashu Bronzewares,Gallery of Potteries and Stone Carvings in Han Dynasty and Gallery of Decorative Arts.The interpreter performed the task in the mode of consecutive interpreting.Based on the transcript,the interpreter summarizes the features of the commentary as informativeness,popularization and colloquialism.Next,the interpreter introduces the Interpretive Theory,and analyzes the guidance of the theory in this practice.The Interpretive Theory proposes that interpretation procedure consists of comprehension,deverbalization and reformulation.Seleskovitch,the representative of this school of thought,illustrated the process with a triangular model.Then,the report expounds on the application of the Interpretive Theory through combing specific cases with relevant principles of the theory.Last,major findings as well as limitations and suggestions are presented.Based on the three features of the commentary,this report proposes six interpretation strategies.First,for informativeness,two strategies of transliterating and interpretating museological terminologies and correcting content-based mistakes are adopted.With the first strategy,the interpreter helps the foreign visitor learn about both Chinese pronunciations and the sense of terminologies.Besides,the interpreter corrects mistakes in the commentary timely,guaranteeing accuracy of information.Application of the two strategies manifests the importance of accumulating encyclopedic knowledge.Second,for popularization,the interpreter comprehends the commentary from the perspectives of explicitness and implicitness and takes cultural background of the foreign visitor into consideration.Two strategies of restituting expressions of popular culture and adding background information are employed.In this practice,for expressions of popular culture which require a lot of time to be explained but are of little importance in the content,the interpreter employs the strategy of restituting.However,if these expressions can facilitate the foreign visitor’s comprehension and acquisition of knowledge,the interpreter introduces background information in detail.Third,for colloquialism,the interpreter proposes two strategies which are integrating redundancy and recasting incoherent and illogical sentences.Under the guidance of the core idea of deverbalization,the interpreter casts original linguistic forms aside and retains the sense of the commentary.Thus,the commentary is presented in a concise,coherent and logical way.Strategies proposed by this report may serve as future reference for interpretation of commentaries,contributing to improving interpretation quality.