A Study Of Interpretation Process From The Perspective Of Relevance-Schema Theory

Interpretation is a cross-cultural communicative activity. It is a process in which interpreters transmit the information of the source language speaker to the target language listener with target language. It is a bridge to achieve the communication of people who speak different languages. Because China strengthens ties with other countries, more and more people are engaged in interpretation to meet the growing demand of the community. The interpretation as a cross-cultural communicative activity gains the concern of researchers from different fields. The interpretation practice has made great achievements. Comparing to the interpretation practice, the study of the interpretation in China lacks adequate theory. Therefore, we need to have a profound theoretical research in this field. This thesis illustrates the interpretation process from the new perspective of Relevance-Schema Theory, revealing the essence of the interpretation.This thesis describes the process of interpretation in the perspective of Relevance-Schema Theory. The success of interpretation depends largely on the transformation of optimal relevance from source language to target language. And the interpreter is at the central position in this process. In the comprehension process of source language, the interpreter selects relevant context to make inference for utterance in order to search for the optimal relevance with source language. Connecting information with his/her own cognitive environment, the interpreter mobilizes relevant schema with utterance and activates the relevant schema so that he/she can build the optimal relevance with source language information and understand comprehensively the informative intention and communicative intention of the source language speaker; in the reproduction process of target language, the interpreter has to consider listeners'cognitive environments and provides them with the most relevant language information to convey the speaker's intention so that listeners can gain a correct understanding of source language with minimal processing effort. So listeners can understand accurately source language without extra processing effort.This thesis includes five chapters. The first chapter is an introduction, which includes the significance and purpose of the study, and the structure of the thesis. The second chapter is the literature review, which is divided into two sections. The first section is about the general introduction of interpretation, and the second section makes an overview to the interpretation research in the perspective of pragmatic theory. The third chapter is about the introduction of Relevance Theory and Schema Theory. The fourth chapter is the description of interpretation process in the perspective of Relevance-Schema Theory, which is divided into three sections. The first section introduces the interpretation process; the second section is the description of the first interpretation process from the point of view of Relevance-Schema Theory; the third section is the description of the second interpretation process from the point of view of Relevance-Schema Theory. The fifth chapter is the conclusion of this thesis, summarizing the findings of this thesis, and the limitations and the suggestions for the future research.