On Application Of Cooperative Principle To Business Consecutive Interpretation

During the past decade, there is an ever increasing demand for business interpreters as the deepening of the open-up policy and the booming of China's economy, especially in the area of finance and foreign trade. Through the introduction of interpreting, we get the idea that consecutive interpretation, as a kind of interpretation, plays very important roles on those occasions where accuracy of rendition is preferred. Business interpretation, due to its special characteristics, requires a high level of accuracy which can be better realized in consecutive interpretation. Therefore, the research on business consecutive interpretation (BCI) has its necessities and significance.From the pragmatics perspective, this paper is to clarify how the Cooperative Principle can be applied to business consecutive interpretation. The Cooperative Principle, put forward by Herbert Grice in his Williams James lectures in 1967, is a key principle of Conversational Implicature Theory in pragmatics and the fundamental rule guiding conversational communication. Consecutive interpretation for business purposes, in which two or more business people speaking different languages discuss business matters through an interpreter, is regarded as a special conversational process. Therefore, this thesis tries to apply the Cooperative Principle to the study of interpreter-mediated business communication in order to reveal the importance of interpreter's application of the Cooperative Principle in the process of the business consecutive interpretation and the importance of using the Cooperative Principle as a criterion to evaluate the quality of interpretation. Through the analysis of a case study from the perspective of the Cooperative Principle and its four maxims, the author draws the conclusion that the interpreter can actively apply the Cooperative Principle to the business consecutive interpretation and hence make his/her due contribution to effective communication.Firstly, the author gives a brief introduction on the subject and the inspiration of this paper as well as the achievements some scholars have made on the areas as interpreting and business interpreting and cooperative principles from which the author has got great inspiration. Through a research on consecutive interpreting after a categorization of interpreting including its history, definition, features, advantages and the interpreting process, the author begins the discussion on business consecutive interpreting. After an introduction to the definition of business and its necessities and significance, the author further explores, on the basis on the former part of the thesis, the nature and features of business consecutive interpreting and finally the qualification needed for business interpreters. Then, the author introduces the Cooperative Principles and its four maxims through daily conversational examples. By analyzing the flouting of maxims, the author got the concept of conversational implicature. In the end, the author put the former ones on business consecutive interpreting examples so that the theory is put on the real live interpreted event to see the results.Through the combination of exemplification and cooperative principle, the author applies the linguistic theory in aim of analyzing the special verbal communication of interpreting, by which the author draws the conclusion that cooperative principle can be applied to interpreting analysis and do its due contribution to interpreting quality analysis.