Exploring Interpreting Strategies For Premiers’ Press Conferences From The Perspective Of Intertextuality

This research is an empirical study based on a self-built corpus–2008-2013Chinese Premiers‘Press Conference Interpreting Corpus. It aims to revealintertextuality that exists in the discourse of Premiers‘Press Conferences from2008to2013and establish analysis models to explore corresponding interpreting strategiesby corpus tools.In1966, Kristeva proposed the concept of intertextuality and pointed out thatthere is intertextual relationship between texts. Devitt applies the intertextuality theoryto studying genre. In her study, she regards a certain social activity as a genre andpoints out that within a genre, there are two types of intertextual relationship–genericintertexualty and referential intertextuality. generic intertextuality focuses oninterdependent relations between texts within a genre, while referential intertextualityrefers to intertextuality between texts of a certain type and texts in other genres. Basedon Devtt‘s theory, this research puts that intertextuality also exists in interpretingactivity and there is intertextual relationship between the discourse in a set ofinterpreting activity and other discourses in the same genre. This intertextualrelationship can also be categorized into generic intertextuality and referentialintertextuality. With awareness of intertextuality in interpreting, interpreters will notonly have a deeper understanding of source text, but also can adopt correspondinginterpreting strategies to different intertextuality.This research regards Primers‘Press Conference as a genre. It investigatesintertextuality in Premiers‘Press Conference from2008to2013and analyzescorresponding interpreting strategies adopted by the interpreters. In this research, bothqualitative approach and quantitative approach are adopted. Corpus tools are used toexamine the cues of both generic intertextuality and referential intertextuality. In thecorpus, generic intertextuality is characterized by keywords and referentialintertextuality is shown by quotations. Statistic features presents that in Premiers‘ Press Conferences, there are both generic and referentical intertextuality. The thesisalso attempts to explore possible strategies used by interpreters through concordingtarget texts corresponding to intertextual part of the source texts. It is found thatinterpreters tend to borrow interpretation of keywords from previous texts; as forreferential intertextuality, when the meaning of the quotation is well suited in thecontext, interpreters directly interpret the original meaning from the source text, butwhen the original meaning of the quotation can not fully convey the meaning in thecontext, interpreters tend to add contextual information to make the interpretationmore effective. This research attempts to describe the interpreting strategies inauthentic interpreting context rather than prescribe norms.Since this research is based on authentic corpus, it is of empirical value to revealthe significant to study intertextuality in interpreting and corresponding interpretingstrategies, as it may provide references for future practioners. The intertextual featuresfound in premiers‘press conference and relevant strategies can also providereferences for interpreting practice and interpreting teaching.