Strategies For Handling Redundancy In Chinese-English Diplomatic Interpreting

Entering into the new century,diplomatic interpreting serves increasingly important roles in communicating China’s policies and stances on both domestic and diplomatic affairs.Within the scope of diplomatic interpreting,the Chinese Premier’s press conference interpreting represents one of the most influential types.During the Chinese Premier’s press conference,questions on all respects of China are raised by reporters from around the world.To facilitate communication between the Premier and reporters,the interpreter is expected to transmit information accurately and timely.As an intrinsic nature of human language,redundancy can assist interpreters in anticipating the coming information,but at the same time,it also brings obstacles to high-quality interpretation,as redundancy unbalance,which hinders listeners from comprehending messages or drags down communication efficiency,easily occurs in interlingual communication.In light of such potential risks,effective strategies are needed to cope with redundancy-related problems.Guided by Information Theory,the thesis conducts a descriptive-explanatory study of strategies for handling redundancy in Chinese-English diplomatic interpreting with a case study on Premier Li Keqiang’s press conference interpreting from 2016 to 2020.The study proposes to classify redundancy into explicit and implicit redundancy,which are analyzed with typical examples from Premier Li’s speeches.Afterwards,by contrasting the source and the target speeches,strategies used by the interpreter to tackle redundancy are summarized: for explicit redundancy,the interpreter adopts the strategies of omission,condensation,and substitution,while for implicit redundancy,addition,explanation,and domestication are applied.It is hoped that this study will be of value in terms of both enriching the study of diplomatic interpreting and serving as guidance to interpreting practice and teaching.