A Practice Report On Metaphor Processing In Consecutive Interpreting

Metaphor is traditionally regarded as powerful rhetorical tools,but recent studies have deemed metaphor as cognitive,communicative and cultural tool,just as what Lakoff and Johnson once said,“We live our lives on the basis of inferences we derive via metaphor.” Since metaphors are important for human beings to comprehend the world and communicate with each other,metaphorical competence supposedly penetrates all aspects covered by “communicative language ability”,which means this ability is significant in communication of multilingual settings.In communicative multilingual context,metaphors are often applied to polish the language so as to better express and disseminate ideas.Interpreting,as a complicated goal-oriented activity to realize both meaning transmitting and intention exchanges in a faithful manner,ought to play its role in conveying metaphorical meaning felicitously.In this way,metaphorical competence is considerably important for interpreters to maximize the communicative effect.As a student interpreter,the author finds that metaphors permeate in the public speeches of different genres,playing an essential role in comprehending and interpreting the original texts.In light of this,the author decides to observe her own metaphor processing in English-Chinese consecutive interpreting.In Conference Interpreting: A Trainer’s Guide,it is found that,as only real recordings can ensure the real-world speech to be both natural and uncompromising,public speeches become the common source of most interpreting teaching and training materials.Moreover,discourse on politics,economy and education are trending topics in authentic interpreting practices,and the related materials can easily be found online,via the websites of Ministries and large corporations.Hence,the interpreting exercises chosen in this report are divided into Discourse Type One(3 politics-economy-related speeches)and Discourse Type Two(3 education-related speeches),with one exercise in the first tyoe to be finished every Monday and one in the second type every Wednesday for three consecutive weeks.Along this line of consideration,this reports aims at working out practical exploration on the following three issues:(1)What types of metaphors are involved in politics-economy discourse and education discourse,and what strategies do the author apply in processing such identified metaphors?(2)What are the rules and features of the author’s metaphor processing,and how does the author demonstrate a dynamic way of processing metaphors in interpreting during such a period as three weeks in length?(3)What may influence the way that the author processes metaphor?This report attempts to generalize the author’s individualized tendencies and characteristics of metaphor use in CI of different types of discourses,summarize the characteristics of metaphors in different themes,explore the appropriate strategies for processing the metaphors,investigate whether metaphor use is conducive to improving interpreting performance,and provide some enlightenment for future metaphor-related research and the development of metaphorical competence in interpreting teaching and learning.