Translation Of Tourist Brochure In The Light Of Relevance Theory

This thesis tries to explore the translation of tourist brochures from Chinese into English from the perspective of cognition and communication in the light of relevance theory. By analyzing some typical and practical versions of tourist brochures translated from Chinese into English, this paper attempts to adapt relevance theory to guiding the analysis and the translation of some tourist brochures promoting Chinese scenic spots.Relevance theory is not a theory concerning translation specially but it can explain and guidetranslation effectively. Tourist brochures are the product of the typical communication activity------tourism. Relevance theory shows the power of explanation and guidance to its translation.According to relevance theory, translation can be regarded as cognitively inferential communication process. Like all communication, translation makes use of the cognitive drive for relevance, that is, expectations about the effects it will yield and the mental effort it will cost. Quite generally, an utterance comes with a presumption of its own optimal relevance; that is, there is an implicit guarantee that the utterance is the most relevant one the speaker could have produced, given his/her abilities and his/her preferences, and that it is at least relevant enough to be worth processing. That utterance carrying this presumption motivates a particular comprehension procedure, which, in successful communication, reduces the number of possible interpretations to one: in essence, it licenses a hearer to consider possible interpretations in the order of their accessibility (that is, to follow a path of least effort) and to stop as soon as he/she reaches one that satisfies his expectation of relevance. Therefore, the translator's task is to arrive at the optimal relevance, that is, by reading his/her translation, the target readers can expect to spend the minimum efforts to get adequate contextual effect, so that the output of translation can successfully match the original author's intention with the reader's expectation. To be consistent with the principle of relevance. the translator must take into account both source language author's intention and target language readers' cognitive contexts in the course of translation. To achieve this, the translator takes the responsibility of the dual ostensive-inferential procession. First, he/she must infer the communicative intention of the original writer; second he/she must take into consideration the cognitive context of the target readers. That is to say, he/she must take into consideration the mutual cognitive context and target reader's cognitive competence. In translation the translator must make clear whether the source text writer's contextual assumptions exist in the target reader's cognitive context and if it is difficult for the target readers to understand the contextual assumptions. To achieve successful communication the translator must strive for optimal relevance, that is, to improve the contextual effect of the translation and reduce target reader's cognitive efforts. The translator must apply proper translation methods flexibly to achieve the optimal relevance of translation text. In other words, he/she should make the readers acquire adequate context without making gratuitous efforts. To achieve optimal relevance the translator can adopt descriptive translation. He/she can resort to the methods such as addition, deletion, adaptation, etc. as long as these methods can help the translation achieve optimal relevance among target readers.To better explain the application of relevance theory in tourist brochure translation, the writer collects some typical examples of translation of tourist brochures from Chinese into English and makes detailed analysis of them. We have found that, under the guidance of relevance theory, different translation methods like literal translation, free translation, transliteration, etc. could help improve the quality of C-E translation of tourist brochures more effectively. Limited by the scope, the present study calls for follow-up efforts to look into how relevance theory can be employed to deal with the translation of Chinese tourist brochures systematically.