| China’s international publicity is of vital importance for presenting and establishing a credible,lovable and respectable image of China in the international community.Among all diplomatic settings,the interpreter-mediated government press conference not only showcases the attitudes,positions and policies of the Chinese government,but also is one of the most important and representative channels for promoting China.Chinese Premier Press Conference provides an opportunity for journalists to raise questions towards the premier directly.Nonetheless,it is possible for journalists to raise questions that would pose some threats to the Premier’s face and the national image.Therefore,it is crucial for interpreters to coordinate the facework to convey China’s positions and present the national image through their interpreting.This thesis is intended to investigate whether interpreters play a facilitative role in facework in Chinese Premier Press Conferences and how they deal with face-threats at the pragmatic level.An empirical study was conducted out of this purpose,in which participants were required to rate the face-threatening degree of the selected questions and their interpreted counterparts in the press conferences.The rating results were statistically compared to examine the effect of the interpreters’ renditions of facethreats.Interpreting directionality and different face-threatening levels were also taken into consideration.On this basis,the present study further analyzed the facework strategies and specific coping strategies adopted by the interpreters through the case study.The results show that via their coordination at the pragmatic level,interpreters decreased the face-threatening degree of original utterances to preserve the Premier’s face,and construct a more positive national image.In addition,interpreting directionality exerted an impact on interpreters’ mediation of face-threats.They have made more efforts for facework in Chinese-English interpreting direction than in the other direction.Furthermore,interpreters were also more prudent to questions with higher face-threatening degree.Among all the facework strategies,interpreters have substantially adopted Elimination strategy and Attenuation strategy and have been extremely cautious about using Strengthening strategy and Addition strategy.Also,interpreters have employed a variety of coping strategies to attenuate the face-threats in journalists’ questions.Shield,approximator,use of “we”,lexical understatement and explicitness were the five most used coping strategies.This thesis suggests that interpreters’ pragmatic roles show great adaptability,which both satisfies the communicative needs and flexibly coordinates the cognitive resources.To the best of my knowledge,the present study is the first attempt to explore interpreters’ meditation of facework in Chinese government press conferences from a pragmatic perspective and the effect of interpreting on constructing the national image through a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods,echoing the call for the“social turn” in the academic field. |
