Dealing With Fuzzy Information In Interpreting-With The Relevance-Theoretic Approach

This paper is an interdisciplinary study of interpreting and linguistics, covering fuzzy linguistics, Relevance Theory and interpreting. Starting from the fuzzy information, the author recognizes its importance and necessity since fuzziness and precision coexist in the interpreting context; however, it is normally ignored or taken for granted by interpreters or interpreting researchers. Any neglecting may lead to misunderstanding of the source language. The author does the research and study on how to deal with fuzzy information in interpreting in the hope of improving the overall quality of interpreting by taking fuzziness into consideration.The existing researches on fuzziness in interpreting mainly focus on the general summary of different strategies, but do not present the detailed process of dealing with it. The author takes Relevance Theory as a general theoretical framework and an approach to interpreting with an aim to filling up the research vacancy. The paper starts with an introduction of fuzzy theory, its origin and development; after that, the author introduces Relevance Theory and its relationship with interpreting. The author analyzes and puts forward the process of dealing with fuzzy information in interpreting on the basis of Relevance Theory, including how to take advantages of the speaker's stimulus, how to construct the contextual assumption and how to give the rendering in interpreting. After the above analyses, case studies are followed, which cover three main contexts in interpreting, that is, business interpreting, diplomatic interpreting and touring interpreting. Finally, the author concludes the paper by offering the limitations and suggestions for further studies on interpreting.