A Report On Chinese-English Museum Interpretation From The Context Perspective Of Relevance Theory

This paper is based on a museum interpretation practice report completed by the author at the Chengdu Museum.Museum interpretation often involves unique cultural backgrounds,social factors,and rich historical information,which is the case of the guide introduction of the Chengdu Museum,so interpreters must be aware of the role and implication of context in their translational and communicational activities.This paper will first describe the interpreting event and then focus on analyzing the transcribed data and discuss how museum interpreters can reasonably choose their interpreting strategies from the perspective of context,under the guidance of the relevance theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson.As suggested by Gutt(2004),under the relevance theory,interpreters need to follow the principle of pursuing the optimal contextual effect to achieve the optimal relevance.Therefore,in order to explore the influence of different contexts on interpretation strategies,this report proceeds from the theoretical construct of“context” and adopts the context classification proposed by Yu(2011)as the analytical framework for the case study,in which contexts are categorized into linguistic,cultural and situational contexts.The case study shows that for linguistic context,interpreters need to focus on the logic and semantics of the text instead of the literal correspondence;for cultural context,interpreters need to accumulate more cultural knowledge and annotate it appropriately in interpretation;for situational context,interpreters need to make use of all the factors of the scene to help the interpretation.