A Research On Interpretation From The Perspective Of Goal Adaptation Theory

Since the 1950s translation studies has undergone two major stages—structural and deconstructive studies,and gradually established a scientific status of translation studies,forming a systematic theoretical framework for translation studies.However,there are deficiencies in both of these two paradigms,hindering the further development of translation studies.Structural translation studies focused on the abstract language conversion mechanism,ignoring all the external factors that may affect the translation activities.Being clearly aware of the defects of structural translation studies,deconstructive translation studies took many of the external factors into consideration,but too much emphasis on external factors deviated translation studies from the language itself We believe that the language theories which could guide the translation studies should not only reveal the law governing the use of abstract language,but also study the impact of the external factors that may affect the use and understanding of language.Pragmatics is the very theory that meets the above characteristics.The combination of pragmatics and translation studies can overcome the deficiencies of previous translation studies,and promote the development of translation studies.Compared to translation,interpreting studies and pragmatics have more in common as they have the same research object—the use of dynamic language.Therefore,we believe that the pragmatics and interpreting studies should have more interaction.On the one hand,the theories of pragmatics can provide theoretical support for interpreting;on the other hand,interpreting,in turn,could test the effectiveness of pragmatic theories.However,based on the summary of research paradigms of Western interpretation studies,we found that Western interpreting research mainly borrowed theories from the cognitive science,neuroscience and the discourse analysis theories.The use of pragmatic theories is relatively small,which mainly concentrates on the cognitive pragmatic theory—the Relevance Theory.According to our investigation on the research status of Western and Chinese interpretation studies from the perspective of pragmatics,the number of studies in Western world is extremely limited,.In EBSCO database,only 13 relative papers can be found published in international academic journals from 2004 to 2014.Although the number of interpretation research papers from the perspective of pragmatics in China is slightly more compared to the West(303 articles),it is still way too limited compared to the translation studies from the perspective of pragmatics(5169 article).This paper hopes to make up for the limitation of the number of interdisciplinary research of interpreting studies and further develop pragmatic interpretation studies.Although interpreting studies emphasize the interdisciplinary research,but that does not necessarily mean completely abandoning the existing translation theories,but supplementing and developing the existing translation theories with the achievements of other subjects.This dissertation uses Skopos Theory as the foundation,and at the same time introduces the Principle of Goal Direction and the Adaptation Theory in pragmatics,to construct the Goal Adaptation framework of interpretation and state the main viewpoints of this framework.Translation studies are always around some basic research questions,and any translation theory should first be able to discuss the basic research issues in translation.From the perspective of the Goal Adaptation framework,this paper discusses some basic theoretical issues of interpretation,including the principles of interpretation,evaluation standards of interpretation and the role of the translator.This paper especially focuses on the interpretation process and describes the process of interpretation from the perspective of the Goal Adaptation framework which mainly includes three stages:the analysis of the goal,understanding of the goal and the adaptation to the goal.Any kind of theory is abstracted from practices,and at the same time guides the practices.Interpreting theories must be tested in interpreting practices.As in government press conference interpretation,the interpreters have gone through strict training,and have rich experience in actual practice,they are quite representative in consecutive interpretation.At the same time,the government press conference interpreting research also has very important practical significance.Therefore,we try to use the Goal Adaptation framework in government press conference interpretation to guide different stages of the government press conference interpretation.And through the observation of the large scale field interpreting corpus,this paper analyzes the statistics of commonly used translation methods for interpreters in some special translation phenomena and uses the Goal Adaptation framework to explain different choices made,to proof the effectiveness of the Goal Adaptation framework.At the end,this paper makes a reflection on the limitations of itself,and discusses the possible future research prospects.The main contents of this dissertation is briefly summarized as follows:Chapter one,introduction.This chapter first introduces the background of the research,analyzes the limitations of structural and deconstructive translation studies,the possibility and necessity of the combination of translation studies and pragmatics,the commonalities between pragmatics and interpreting studies,as well as the importance and representativeness of government press conference interpreting.Secondly,this chapter explains the research significance,research questions,research methods,research content,the source of the corpus and the structure of the dissertation.Chapter two,literature review.This chapter mainly uses the bibliometric method to introduce the research status of interpreting studies from the perspective of pragmatics and conference interpreting studies both home and abroad from 2004 to 2014,and analyzes the research status and existing problems in current studies.Chapter three,the construction of Goal Adaptation framework.This chapter first introduces the basic theories which constitute to the Goal Adaptation framework,and evaluates the progress and limitations of them respectively.Based on the similarity and complementarity of these three theories,this chapter constructs the framework of the Goal Adaptation framework and states the main viewpoints of this framework.Chapter four,the discuss on the basic issues of interpreting studies under the framework of Goal Adaptation.This chapter discusses some of the basic theoretical issues in interpreting from the perspective of the Goal Adaptation theory,including the principles of interpretation,evaluation standards of interpretation and the role of the translator.Chapter five,the process of interpretation under the framework of the Goal Adaptation.This chapter mainly describes the process of interpretation in the perspective of the Goal Adaptation framework.The interpretation process mainly includes three stages:the analysis of the goal,understanding of the goal and the adaptation of the goal.The analysis of the goal includes the analysis of the goal of all parties involved in the interpreting activities,the goal relation analysis and the goal structure analysis;the understanding of the goal is the interpreter’s understanding of the communication goal of the speaker,which is influenced by a variety of external factors,including non language behavior,situational context,social context and cultural context;the adaptation to the goal is the choices made by the interpreter in various levels of language,including the discourse level,syntactic level,lexical level and phonological level.Every choice made is to adapt to the multi-level and multi-dimensional translation goals.Chapter six,the application of the Goal Adaptation framework to the macro level of government press conference interpretation.This chapter uses the Goal Adaptation framework in the government press conference interpreting studies,applying it to the macro level analysis,including the analysis of the goals of all parties involved in the interpreting activities,the goal relation analysis and the goal structure analysis and discusses the application of the principles of interpreting and interpreting evaluation standards in government press conference interpretation.Chapter seven,the application of the Goal Adaptation framework to the micro level of the government press conference interpretation.This chapter observes and analyzes the choices made by the interpreter at all levels of language based on the statistics from large field data of government press conference interpreting and uses the Goal Adaptation framework to explain the reasons behind.Firstly,we analyze the coherence of the goal in government press conference interpreting discourse;secondly,in specific aspects of language,we selects some difficult problems in the government press conference interpretation and observes and analyzes the actual choices made by the interpreters to verify the effectiveness of the Goal Adaptation framework.Our observation results show that interpreters have adopted flexible translation methods in every language level,and the most important guidance for their choices is the interpretation goal.Chapter eight,conclusion.This chapter summarizes the whole paper,expounds the main conclusions,states the innovations,reflects on the limitations,and discusses the future research prospects.The contribution of this paper is mainly reflected in:first of all,this paper tries to construct a new interpreting theoretical framework from the perspective of pragmatics—the Goal Adaptation framework.It re-discusses the basic theoretical issues from the new perspective,including the principles of interpretation,evaluation standards of interpretation and the role of the translator and re-describes the interpretation process from the new perspective,promoting the interdisciplinary research of interpretation and pragmatics to some extent.Secondly,this paper makes up for deficiencies in the Skopos theory by combining it with the Principle of Goal Direction and Adaptation Theory,and further improves and develops Skopos theory.At the same time,this paper also enriches and expands the scope of the Principle of Goal Direction by expanding its research scope into the field of interpretation.Thirdly,the application of the Goal Adaptation framework in government press conference interpretation could provide guidance to the interpreters to master the principles of interpretation,better understand the interpreting steps,make better choices of translation methods,and it also could play a certain role in guiding quality evaluation and the interpreter training.