Analysis Of Causes Of The Cross-cultural Pragmatic Failure In Liaison Interpreting

As a typical cross-cultural communicative activity, interpreting plays anincreasingly important role in the international communication. To be a qualifiedinterpreter who has the responsibility of connecting different cultures, one shouldnot only be fluently bilingual, but also have cross-cultural awareness, improvepragmatic competence and make flexible adjustments of the rendition whenneeded. In this way, pragmatic failure can be avoided as much as possible.Compared with conference interpreting, liaison interpreting has its owncharacteristics including less formal atmosphere, unpredictability of the discourseand relatively high flexibility of the interpreter. Though liaison interpreting is themost common form of interpreting in our daily life, few researches have beenconducted on it. Under the enlightenment of Pochhaker’s Interactant Model of theinterpreting and Ren Wen’s Three-way Communication Model of LiaisonInterpreting, the author of this thesis has constructed a theoretical framework forthis research for the purpose of analyzing causes of pragmatic failure in liaisoninterpreting and proposing some tactics for avoiding pragmatic failure. Accordingto the author, there are three causes: lacking linguistic and extra-linguisticknowledge; lacking cross-cultural awareness; improper handling of theinterpreter’s flexibility.Through a tentative analysis of causes of pragmatic failure in liaisoninterpreting, this thesis aims at attracting more attention on this issue, and servingas guidance for interpreters to avoid pragmatic failure and hence to improve theirperformance in interpreting.