On Interpreter’s Subjectivity In Academic Lecture Interpreting

As China speeds up opening to the world,the opening-up in academic community is also in full swing.All institutions of higher learning frequently invite experts and scholars to give academic lectures in China with the aim to promote academic exchanges and broaden horizons of students.Interpretation realizes the conversion between languages in these academic lectures,and the form of consecutive interpretation is usually adopted.This thesis starts from the theory of subjectivity and believes that an interpreter naturally enjoys subjectivity as the subject of interpretation in an academic lecture interpreting.Activity and passivity are the two aspects of interpreter’s subjectivity while activity is the dominant aspect.Based on pre-interpreting preparation,an interpreter positively adopts appropriate interpretation techniques to deliver a rendition in accordance with his or her own cognition and understanding on source text.Meanwhile,an interpreter also faces restrictions due to passivity which can be classified into internal and external passivity.Activity and passivity jointly affect the quality of language.When exerting subjectivity,an interpreter becomes more visible by playing the roles of gatekeeper,co-interlocutor and mediator in a conversation.In academic lecture interpreting,an interpreter needs to exert subjectivity reasonably so as to ensure that a lecture could go smoothly.This thesis takes the consecutive interpretation practice on the academic lecture "Federalism in Asia" as a case study,makes a contrast between its original and target texts,and studies the subjectivity of the interpreter.The activity of the interpreter is manifested through the adoption of interpretation techniques,including addition,omission,rearrangement,explanation,and tone-softening.In this practice,the interpreter’s internal passive elements include inflexible phrase collocation,fault in note-taking and insufficient political knowledge reserve.The interpreter’s external passive element is the distraction from on-site contingencies.Internal and external passive elements lead to problems of information loss in rendition,broken delivery and request for repetition.Besides,this thesis thinks that in this practice,the interpreter mostly played the roles of gatekeeper and co-interlocutor while the role of mediator was relatively weaker.At present,studies on interpreter’s subjectivity mainly focus on liaison interpreting.More researches on interpreter’s subjectivity in conference interpreting shall be conducted.Lecture interpreting belongs to conference interpreting,and a discussion on interpreter’s subjectivity in lecture interpreting is a complementation to existing researches.Studying interpreter’s subjectivity in different types of interpretation will further break the marginalization of interpreters,which is influential to interpreter’s development and interpretation teaching.