A Report On C-E Consecutive Interpreting Of "Further Questions Leading To A Bigger World"

This report,guided by relevance theory,is based on a simulated C-E consecutive interpreting practice using an interview from Bigger Than Us,a program of ETW Studio on Apple Podcasts.Under the theme of "Further Questions Leading to A Bigger World",the interviewer Xu Tao and Professor Li Yun exchanged their views about eastern and western cultures and discussed how to raise underlying questions.There are mainly four difficulties in the interpreting practice.First,there are a lot of metaphorical expressions in this interpreting practice.Vivid and abstract,these expressions may hinder interpreter’s comprehension when seeking optimal relevance.Second,fourcharacter Chinese idioms containing rich cultural connotations are difficult as more processing effort will be needed to get the contextual effects.Third,semantic fuzziness,including incomplete sentences and misused conjunctions makes the audience confused.Fourth,some long sentences with heavily-embedded modifiers increase the difficulty of interpreting for the structure of the sentences needs to be reorganized in a way that is more consistent with the habits of target language.To cope with these difficulties,the report analyzes how to adopt flexible interpreting strategies under the guidance of relevance theory so as to achieve the optimal relevance for the target audience.Relevance theory aims to search for adequate contextual effects without putting the audience to any gratuitous expenditure of processing effort.Under the guidance of relevance theory,the author chooses different coping tactics to address these challenges.Literal interpreting plus explanation is employed to deal with metaphorical expressions.This strategy focuses on retaining the cultural image and explains its deep meaning according to the context.The strategy of paraphrasing is adopted to cope with Chinese idioms.The interpreter gets rid of the literal meaning of Chinese idioms and makes their connotative meaning ostensive so as to recreate the communicative intention of the speaker in a certain context.Explicitation is used to supplement the implied information through using clauses and make the semantic meaning coherent through logic restructuring.Sentence restructuring is applied to reorganize the information order of a sentence so as to address the heavilyembedded modifiers.This report is guided by relevance theory and effectively discusses and analyzes interpretation problems in this interview and it is hoped that this practice will provide a new case for future interpreting tasks of the same type.