| Interpreting is both a cognitive activity and a communicative activity. As a special means of verbal communication, interpreting aims to facilitate the communication between people with different languages and cultures. Relevance Theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson considered verbal communication as an ostensive-inferential process; while as a bilingual communicative activity, the aim of interpreting is to establish mutual understanding of communicators. Therefore, Relevance Theory is of great significance in successfully realizing communicative effects in interpreting. As a connection between both sides, the interpreter should seek optimal relevance between discourse and context (i.e. find optimal relevance between discourses and contextual assumptions), infer contextual implications to get contextual effects and provide such relevant inference to the TL audience, so as to facilitate successful understanding and communication between two sides.The author of this thesis firstly briefs on the basic concepts of Relevance Theory, such as, inferential feature of communication (an ostensive-inferential process), context and optimal relevance; and analyzes the application of Relevance Theory to interpreting activity. Eventually, by analyzing the record materials of interpreters in a case study, the author has also found different features and focuses in interpreting. Thus he emphasizes the following two aspects, namely, searching optimal meaning of SL and optimizing TL. In one word, this thesis aims at helping interpreters better grasp the essence of interpreting and maximizing the communicative effects in interpreting, so as to guide and improve interpreting practice. |
