| As conference interpreting plays an important role in various international stages, the appearance of Chinese idioms will cause great difficulty to the interpreter and even the misinterpretation of them will lower the quality of interpreting. Therefore, it is of predominant significance to tackle this problem. Combined with the Relevance Theory this thesis concentrates on the linguistic phenomenon of Chinese idioms and is designed to study on the phenomenon of cognitive complements by selecting, analyzing, integrating idioms. It also aims at exploiting how the interpreter conducts the cognitive complements in practice and finding out the participation of different cognitive complements in the processes of sense-making, memorizing and reconstruction, reformulation. All these are conducive to improving the quality of interpretation and helping establish the optimal relevance between the speaker and the audience to accomplish the communicative goal. This thesis provides a new perspective for the research of idiom interpretation.Adopting qualitative research method, three other research approaches like induction, deduction, analysis are entirely demonstrated in the application of them. Due to Chinese idioms as the object of study, the material mainly comes from the high-rank leader’s conference speech. The lines of Chinese idioms are credible and representative. These idioms lay a solid foundation for elaborating on the specific research.Through analyzing, the research results are as below:1)Interpreting is a dynamic and cognitive process where cognitive complements exist in the different process of idioms interpretation. The process of interpreting can be divided as two steps: sense-making, memorizing and reconstruction, reformulation. Under the support from the Relevance Theory, the object of process of sense-making and memorizing is to seek for and set up optimal relevance; the object of process of reconstruction and reformulation is to pass on that optimal relevance. In order to gain the optimal relevance, the interpreter is supposed to activate his or her own contextual assumptions to conduct cognitive activities such as analyzing, comprehending and integrating. All kinds of cognitive elements are thereby triggered to process the language. Cognitive complements are proved to exist in the whole process of idiom interpretation.2)In the process of sense-making and memorizing, cognitive baggage, situational context, verbal context embedded in cognitive complements actively participate in the course of understanding and grasping the meaning of source language. The cognitive baggage includes world knowledge as well as theme and term knowledge. The situational context covers occasion, speaker’s elements and audience’s reaction. Under the supplement of these components, the interpreter spends the least cognitive efforts to attain the maximum cognitive effects so as to establish the relevance between the speaker and the interpreter.3) In the process of reconstruction and reformulation, cognitive complements involving linguistic disparity, cultural context, interpreting professionalism and emotion in the interpreter’s brain are positively mobilized and then the audience oriented rendition has been created. The above-mentioned cognitive elements contribute to improve the quality of interpreted utterance and transmit the optimal relevance by delivering the precise information to the audience. |
