Adaptation Of Context In Interpreting

Compared with the thriving development of translation, interpreting is a new face to academic field. The professionalization of interpreting started at the beginning of the 20th century, whereas the academic study in this field was not conducted until the 1950s. With the development of interpreting, focus has been changed gradually from experimental research to interdisciplinary studies, aiming to blaze new ways for interpreting study.Interpreting process has always been one of the focuses of researchers, and various interpreting processing models have been established. Among the study of interpreting process, context is always an inevitable factor. Context study has been gradually viewed as a dynamic factor rather than a static one. This development is of great meaning to studies on interpreting process and interpreting performance.In his monograph Understanding Pragmatics, Belgian pragmatic professor Jef Verschueren put forward the"Theory of Linguistic Adaptability", which can serve as the framework of context study. In Verschueren's theory, language has three properties: variability, negotiability, and adaptability. Language use is a process of choice-making which is closely related to the contextual correlates. More importantly, Verschueren emphasizes that the adaptation is a bidirectional process rather than unidirectional one. In other words, once the utterer makes his choice to adapt to current context, context is also reconstructed. In return, this reconstructed context will exert further influence on the following choice-making process."Theory of Linguistic Adaptability"provides a new perspective for the dynamic study of context, which, combined with the adaptability of language, determines the dynamic adaptation of context in interpreting process.This thesis tries to apply"Theory of Linguistic Adaptability"to examine the contextual adaptation in interpreting process at sentence-level, co-text level, cultural level and background level. Based on the above discussion, advices on how to adapt to and manipulate the context in interpreting process are introduced so as to shed some light on how to improve the interpreter's performance and achieve satisfactory effect.