Analysis Of Translator’s Subjectivity In TV Simultaneous Interpreting Of President Obama’s Speeches Analysis Of Translator’s Subjectivity In TV Simultaneous Interpreting Of President Obama’s Speeches

The accelerating globalization makes for deepening interactions among various countries across the globe, hence the growing demand for smooth communication with the help of interpreters. In the information age, television is playing an increasingly important role in spreading timely information to every corner of the world. With the deepening of bilateral relationship between China and the United States, the attention attached to the United States by the Chinese is on the rise. Naturally TV simultaneous interpretation draws increasing attention from the audience.This study tries to examine the translator’s subjectivity manifested in the TV simultaneous interpretation of President Obama’s two inaugural speeches. Since the status of translators or interpreters has long been marginalized and their subjective role long been obscured, it is of significance to examine their performance in displaying their translator’s subjectivity. Since the process of simultaneous interpretation is complicated, this thesis intends to exclude such aspects as cognitive research in simultaneous interpretation study and focus on textual analysis. The performance of Ms Miao Nan, an interpreter and reporter from Phoenix TV, in the TV simultaneous interpretation of President Obama’s two inaugural speeches is adopted for a case study. In this thesis, the following questions are to be answered:1) what are the difficulties of TV simultaneous interpreting?2) How are the translator’s subjectivity manifested in the TV simultaneous interpretation of President Obama’s Speeches?3) What strategies did the interpreter adopt to functionally display translator’s subjectivity?4) How can translator’s subjectivity be better displayed? With a careful study both on literatures and practical cases, answers to these questions have been worked out. Difficulties of TV simultaneous interpreting include daunting pressure from a high level of exposure, the unpredictability of various situations as well as the lack of script and face-to-face communication with the speaker in advance. The interpreter from Phoenix TV well displayed her subjectivity in the pursuit of semantic equivalence, formal equivalence and acoustic equivalence with the use of well-positioned interpretation tactics. Such interpretation strategies as omission and transfiguration, parallelism, addition and syntactic linearity have facilitated the well display of the interpreter’s subjectivity. It is reasonably inferred that the interpreter’s good cross-cultural awareness and well-prepared background knowledge can enable the interpreter to better display his or her subjectivity in TV simultaneous interpretation.