A Report On Simulated Interpreting Of Kai-Fu Lee's Speeches On AI From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Interpretation is a dynamic and complex process of language communication across languages and cultures.Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory pointed out that language communication is a process of ostensive-inferential communication.From the perspective of cognition,interpretation is a process of ostensive-inferential communication across languages and cultures.Relevance theory has a strong explanatory power for interpretation and it is of great significance for the applied study of interpretation.Under the guidance of relevance theory,taking AI as the specific discourse material,this paper has conducted a simulated interpretation of two speeches on AI made by Dr.Kai-Fu Lee at TED and TIME 100 Summit.It combined theory and practice closely.The paper has found that the interpreter,who plays the dual roles of both listener and speaker in the process of interpretation,is engaged in different tasks.As the listener,the interpreter needs to reason out the communicative intention of the speaker according to the speaker's ostensive behavior.As the speaker,the interpreter needs to seek for the optimal relevance to combine his or her own experience with the cognitive environments,encyclopedic knowledge and other information.Then he expresses the inferred communicative intention to the listener in a way consistent with the thinking and expression habits of the target language.The purpose of doing this is to let the listener make minimal processing effort in the greatest contextual effect to achieve effective interpretation communication.In these two rounds of ostensive-inferential-ostensive process,it is a very appropriate interpretation strategy for the interpreter to make appropriate adjustments in the amplification and omission of vocabularies,voice conversion and word order of the target language.At the same time,for those interpretation errors caused by lack of relevance between the speaker's ostensive process to the interpreter and the interpreter's inferential-ostensive process to the listener,the interpreter also proposed some solutions.In addition to applying relevance theory in the stage of on-site interpretation,it also found that relevance theory plays an important guiding role in the stage of pre-task interpretation preparation and post-task interpretation analysis and summary.I hope that it can provide certain guidance and reference significance for AI-themed interpretation in the future through this simulated interpreting practice of AI theme.