Intermediary-context And Its Construction In The Light Of Relevance Theory

Translation process involves three participants, i.e. the source text author, the translator and the target reader. It is a special case of communication with two ostensive-inferential processes.In the first ostensive-inferential process, the source text author conveys his/her communicative intention to the translator who processes the source text author's stimulus or utterance in the light of principle of relevance, by applying the original contextual assumptions, and arrives at the interpretation of the source text. In this process, the translator plays the role of a receptor. After finishing this communicative process, the translator enters into the second ostensive-inferential communicative process. At this time the translator becomes the addresser or communicator. He displays information to the target text reader according to the source text, his/her understanding and mastering of the source language writer's communicative intention, the target language environment and his estimate of the target language reader's cognitive context; And the target text reader processes the information conveys and derives the translator- intended interpretation.So we can see that the writer's communicative purpose is achieved indirectly by a series of turns: the writer creates a body of contextual factors (the source text) by means of his/ her own cognitive context and cognitive sense; the translator decodes the source text by using his \her cognitive context and cognitive sense and forms a context in his mind , and then reproduces the formed context in corresponding linguistic signs of a different language to transmit the writer's communicative purpose; in the end, target language reader sees the writer's purpose by decoding the target text through his \ her own cognitive context and cognitive sense . On this ground, the realization of communication purpose by means of translation is at the same time conditioned by the writer's cognitive context and then contextual factors, the translator's and the target language reader's cognitive contexts, and the contextual factors.By making use of the schema theory in modern cognitive psychology, we prove that the context formed in the translator's mind after his reading of source text can't be equal to the source text context and the target text context. In this thesis , the author calls the formed context as intermediary-context. It is formed by the relevant contextual assumptions the translator gets by activating his own cognitive context in accordance with relevance principle, from which the writer's linguistic intention and intended communicative intention can be achieved as much as possible. It is a bridge connecting the source text context and the target text context. It plays the role of both the translator's reception context and the expression context. In translation, the translator, as a reader, knows the source text's linguistic meaning and communicative meaning by constructing the intermediary-context on the basis of relevance principle . while as a reproducer, the translator transfers the source text's linguistic meaning and communicative meaning by encoding the intermediary -context into the target text after evaluating target reader's cognitive context.Then the author introduces the model of intermediary-context construction in the light of the relevance theory and its application in translation.