A Dialog Approach To Interpretation

Interpretation enjoys a long history. It started with the communication between individuals or peoples when they were going to make a pledge, form an alliance, be united in wedlock, trade, or spread religious faith, to name just a few. However, interpretation was recognized as a profession only after World War I, especially after the Pairs Peace Conference of 1919. To interpret is to orally give the meaning from one language to another language in a grammatical, lexical and syntactic manner, while keeping the connotation of the words and sentences in the Source Language. Interpretation also represents the communication among cultures and nationalities.M.M. Bahktin, a Russian scholar and founding father of Dialog Theory, holds that the nature of life is dialog (Bahktin, 1998:387). The"dialog"here is not just about languages, literature and daily communication between people, but it has more profound connotation that covers all fields in humanities and social sciences. Meanwhile, It represents the dialog of a person with himself or with another person, as well as dialog between man and text, among nations and cultures. In his theory, Bahktin proposed a series of ideas that have been adopted in the research of philosophy, anthropology, literature, linguistics, ethnics, pedagogics, social sciences, etc. Some of the ideas, in particular, can explain interpretation from a dialog perspective, such as surplus of vision, extralocality, active comprehension. In the thesis, interpretation is explained based on the following structure.The thesis consists of six parts.The first part is an introduction to the thesis in general, and the introduction of the new proposals of the author.Chapter One is a review of literature. It provides some basic ideas on interpretation as a whole, definitions, development, features and basic interpreting principles. Introduction to the Dialog Theory is also included in this Chapter.Chapter Two explains interpretation with surplus of vision, thus offering an understanding of interpretation and the interpreter from a new approach.Chapter Three explores the dialog process in interpretation, which is elaborated from two different perspectives, namely, rules of dialog in interpretation and active comprehension.Chapter Four discusses Dialog Theory in professionalism and in the performance of interpreters. In this Chapter, interpretation and the ideas of"completeness"and"connotation", relations between professionalism and"extralocality", judgment as well as orientation are discussed.Chapter Five is the conclusion, which generalizes the entire thesis and offers the author's conclusive remarks: Dialog Theory (DT) gives us a new perspective to interpretation while the process of interpretation is also a process of dialog. Therefore, it integrated with different aspects of the DT. Interpretation is not just practical, rather, it is logical and philosophical. The author only adopts some of Bahktin's ideas to analyze interpretation. Many of the other ideas in the DT have not been applied that need further study and research.