Short-term Preparations For Court Interpreting Of Criminal Cases From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

This thesis aims to probe into how preparations for court interpreting shall be done with Relevance Theory as its theoretical framework.Random selection of interpreters and scarcity of materials available to the interpreters are the two commonly-seen phenomena in China. The status quo of China's court interpreting system has shown that little emphasis has been laid upon interpreter's preparations, which will fail to guarantee the quality of court interpreting, accuracy in particular.In China, court interpreting is playing a more and more important role in the judicial system. How to improve the quality of court interpreting is of great significance. However, the study of court interpreting is long lagging behind, calling for a further and in-depth study in this field. This dissertation employs relevance theory, as it can provide a new cognitive perspective for the study of court interpreting, to analyze what preparations for court interpreting shall be done.Chapter One gives a brief introduction to court interpreting. Literature review of previous studies on court interpreting, Relevance Theory and preparations before interpreting has been done in Chapter Two, on the basis of which the theoretical framework is discussed at length in Chapter Three. Against the backdrop of such a theoretical framework, short-term preparations with emphasis on making full use of the indictment with regard to four major participants to proceeding have been analyzed in Chapter Four. Chapter Five illustrates and analyzes the experiment to testify whether the outcome of the analysis is applicable to practice. The result of the experiment shows that students who have been given an introduction lesson on short-term preparations in light of Relevance Theory dramatically outperformed those who have not. A conclusion is made in the last Chapter. Preparations discussed in the present study might serve as reference for court interpreters. In this way, this thesis also sheds some light on the qualifications for a competent court interpreter, the necessity of legal fundamentals lessons in legal English syllabus and the improvement of court interpreting system.