On Thematic Structure Of Chinese-english Consecutive Interpretation

Language is the tool for communication.During daily practice,people arranged the word order by the communicative dynamism it carries.Every sentence has a starting point and an end one.From functional linguistic point of view,the origin of a sentence is Theme.It is the concern of a clause.The rest of the sentence is built up on the Theme,and that parte is called rheme.It is very important to interpreting practice to know the element of Theme and thematic structure in both source text and target text.This research is a case study of the transcript of Premier Li Keqiang's press conference after the 12 th National People's Congress and the Chinese Political Consultative Conference and its interpretation.Based on the thematic theory put forward by Halliday and other linguistics,the paper studied the element of Theme,function of Theme,interpreting strategy adopted by the interpret for various types of Theme and the reason behind that.This paper adopted both qualitative and quantitative approach.First,the author analyzed the constituents of Theme and the distribution of them.The author found out the constituent of unmarked Theme is personal pronoun and other nominal group and the constituent of marked Theme is conjunctive adjunct,modal adjunct and clause Theme.After that,the author analyzed the interpreting strategy for different constituent of Theme and the reason behind that.The findings are as follows: as for unmarked Theme,the interpreter usually preserves the original thematic pattern.As for conjunctive adjunct as Theme,the more strong the conjunctive adjunct connected the clause with the preceding text,the more likely the interpreter will preserve the original thematic structure.As for modal adjunct,due to the time pressure and other characteristics of interpreting,the interpreter is more likely to omit the modal adjunct and put more attention to key information.As for clause Theme,the interpreter is prone to break the original thematic structure and reconstruct on that is appropriate for the target language.