A Practice Report On Chinese-english Interpretation Of The Commentary Of Jinsha Site Museum

Jinsha Site Museum,the iconic landscape,not only tells widely the stories of Chengdu’s long history and culture,but also has become an indispensable exhibition and research center for ancient Shu culture,and an important place for tourists to visit and rest.The report is based on the interpreter’s experience of interpreting the commentary of Jinsha Site Museum for a foreign visitor.It analyzes the introduction content of the Relic Hall and the first two sub-halls of the Exhibition Hall.The interpreter accomplished the task in the mode of consecutive interpreting.The report aims to explore how the applied strategies under the Interpretive Theory help to achieve the goal of interpreting action.Based on the transcript,the author points out three features of the commentary of the Jinsha Site Museum,namely,informativeness,comprehensiveness and colloquialism.Considering the cultural background and the communicative demands of the foreign visitor,the author faced the biggest difficulty,which was how to express the speaker’s true intention faithfully and keep the features of the commentary in the interpretation.Through class study and literature review,the author learned that the Interpretive Theory divided the interpreting process into comprehension,deverbalization and reformulation,with the ultimate purpose of conveying sense in the discourse,which conformed to the author’s demand of interpreting and provided significant theoretical basis for the report.From the perspective and the guiding principles of the Interpretive Theory and combining with the cases,the report proposes corresponding strategies for the three features of the commentary.Firstly,for informativeness of the commentary,the author adopts two strategies of transliteration with annotation and amplification.Transliteration with annotation can help the foreign visitor learn Chinese pronunciation of the terminologies as well as culture-loaded words and keep the cultural significance.Amplification can add more background information,which is beneficial for the foreign visitor to learn and understand the knowledge.Secondly,for the comprehensiveness,the author applied the strategy of phrase.With the principle of deverbalization,the author transmits meanings of the discourse through acquired knowledge.Thirdly,for the colloquialism,the author proposes two strategies of omission and logical integration,which is to omit the redundant sentences and adjust incoherent and illogical sentences.The report specifies the situations where the strategies are applied,and proposes that the important role of the interpreter’s cognitive supplement on the interpreting performance.Moreover,due to the limitation of the practice,the author also imagines some related factor to interpreting performance such as the guide and the demands of the listener,and provides some suggestions for interpretation about museums.The author wishes that the report could provide guidance in museum-related interpreting practice,and make some achievements and enlightenment on the research of the field.