A Study On Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failures In Interpretation

For a long time, the study of interpretation has been confined to linguistic competence and interpretation skills, quite often the cultural and pragmatic factors are ignored in interpretation analysis and practice, which tends to bring about wrong deciphering and comprehension of source messages, or even the serious consequence of communication breakdown.This paper tries to study interpretation in Chinese-English environment from the perspective of pragmatic failure. The concept"pragmatic failure"was put forward by Dr. Jenny Thomas in Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failure in 1983. It refers to improper expression in cross-cultural communication, and it is different from linguistic error. This paper analyzes the reasons of pragmatic failure in interpretation and its influence on interpretation quality, and further explores measures taken to reduce or avoid pragmatic failure in interpretation from the perspective of cultural differences between English and Chinese and proving that interpreters' linguistic competence does not equal with pragmatic competence.By analyzing the phenomenon of pragmatic failures, the author puts forward some feasible interpretation strategies to overcome pragmatic failures. Firstly, improve interpreters'intercultural awareness and sensitivity between the source and target language from two ways: teaching the culture knowledge and training the culture understanding. The author also employs several translation methods to handle the cultural factors in the process of interpretation, such as pragmatic equivalent interpretation, handling fuzzy information, substitution and addition, as well as sentence structure adjustment.Then the author reaches the conclusion that interpreters should conduct constant and in-depth analyses of the causes of pragmatic failures and try to avoid them in specific interpretations, thus ensuring smooth and effective communications among all parties. Studying the linguistic phenomenon of interpretation from the perspective of cross-cultural pragmatics will help to evaluate interpretation quality in an all-round way, and leads the interpreters to reduce or avoid pragmatic failure in interpretation through practice, so as to achieve better interpretation. Interpretation needs the input and integration of other relevant disciplines, which serve as guiding theories and greatly enhance the overall business interpretation performance.