A Report On Simulated Consecutive Interpreting Of Bill Gates’ Interview On TED Connects From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With the development of globalization,interviews are becoming internationalized,involving guests and viewers worldwide,thus expanding the demand for interpreters.On this occasion,interview interpretation emerges and is proliferating.However,the speakers often talk colloquially;the guests are more likely to talk in an impromptu way.It leads to illogical and redundant expressions,which pose challenges for interpreters.This report aims to discuss certain common difficulties in interview interpreting and tries to give solutions,hoping to shed some light on future interview interpreting activities.Due to COVID-19,the cases in this report are extracted from the transcription of the author’s simulated interpreting practice.The interpreting material is an interview with Bill Gates on “How we must Respond to the Coronavirus Pandemic?” conducted by TED Connects on March 24,2020.In this practice,the lexical difficulties encountered by the author are unfamiliar expressions and vague references;difficulties at the discourse level are redundancies and logical mess.Guided by the relevance theory,the author has proposed five coping methods: repetition,obfuscation,explicitation,simplification,and reformulation.Guided by the relevance theory,the author has realized that interpreters should play their initiative as cognitive subjects in interview interpreting,correctly infer speakers’ communicative intention,link to listeners’ cognitive context,and convey the interpretation that meets target language listeners’ cognitive ability and expectations.It could create the best contextual effect for listeners,and reduce their inference effort,thus achieving optimal relevance.Specifically,the author finds that the relevance theory explains why sometimes interpreters faithfully interpret the source text without adding or subtracting anything,but the target language audience fails to understand.In contrast,sometimes,a slightly modified interpretation is more widely accepted because it is more logical and fits the truth,which reduces the audience’s inference efforts and more accurately conveys the speaker’s verbal intention.Therefore,the author suggests that interpreters should make targeted pre-interpreting preparations while being flexible enough in the process of interpreting to achieve optimal relevance;and focus on developing their pragmatic inference ability in daily training.In this way,they can better understand the speaker’s intention and reproduce it to target listeners clearly in interpreting activities,thus guaranteeing interpretation quality.