Literary Translation And Relevance

As a pragmatic theory interpreting communication, relevance theory is formally proclaimed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in their book Relevance: Communication and Cognition. The influence of relevance theory has greatly gone beyond the field of pragmatics itself, and even extended to the field of translation. The principle of relevance has now become a new principle guiding the pragmatic approach to translation. Noticeably, Gutt has proposed a relevance-theoretic approach to translation in his book Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context.Relevance theory holds that one has to search for optimal relevance of information by means of a certain context in the course of receiving natural language information resulting in successful communication. Translation is a kind of cross-cultural communication. Relevance theory, as a cognitive theory guiding communication, has most powerful explanatory power over translation. So Gutt sees reason to try to describe translation in terms of this theory of human communication. Gutt's efforts lie on the basic premise that the ability of human being to infer what is meant may be accounted for in terms of observing the principle of relevance, defined as achieving maximum benefit at minimum processing cost. Gutt suggests that translation is an instance of interpretive use and that translations seek to resemble their originals interpretively. Translating is constrained by the principle of relevance.According to relevance theory, the process of searching for relevance is a process of cognition and inference and also a process of taking efforts. Within the relevance framework, translation can be defined as a dynamic act of ostensive-inferential verbal interpretation. The explanation to translation with the relevance-theoretic approach is dynamic and dialectical, which has seen the essence of translation and has positive significance in guiding the practice of translation.