Relevance And Adjustability: A Study Of Translating Process In Cultural Image Renderings

The present research is a pragmatic exploration of the translating process in cultural image renderings from the perspective of Relevance-Adjustability Theoretic Approach (RATA in short). This approach is tentatively cultivated by the author on the basis of Sperber's and Wilson's Relevance Theory and Verschueren's Adaptation Theory to investigate the workings of the translator's mind. It intends to give an account of how the information-processing faculties of the translator's mind enable him to carry on cross-cultural communication with the original author and his target audience. The domain of this research is the translator's mental faculties and it is the aim of this study to explore the possibilities in terms of the translator's communicative competence assumed to be part of human minds. The primary purpose of this study is to use my tentative RATA to account for aspects of the translating process.RATA is a new cross-cultural and translator-centered theoretical paradigm. In this paradigm, translating is both a relevance-seeking, ostensive-inferential process and a dynamically-adjusting process. The translator searches for relevance in the source cognitive environment and makes dynamic adjustment in the target cognitive environment. In the translating process, the translator stands at the center of cross-cultural communication between the original author and the target audience. He communicates with the audience by ensuring their cognitive consonance after processing correctly the author's communicative intention. He mobilizes his cognitive resources available and develops his subjectivity to search for the optimal relevance in the source cognitive environment and to make linguistic choices in the target cognitive environment in a variable, mediating andadjustable way. The translator's mental operation is in an indeterminate state before he finds the optimal relevance to the author's communicative intention and makes appropriate linguistic choices to convey the latter's intentions. His cognitive resources will be optimally allocated when he finds the optimal relevance and his linguistic choices successfully satisfy the audience's aesthetic expectations and acceptability level.For the convenience of expression, I intend to divide the whole translating process into Discourse-Interpreting Communicative Process (DICP) and Discourse-Producing Communicative Process (DPCP). But it needs to be pointed out that in the actual course of translation the two sub-processes are constantly intersecting; in other words, the translator's interpreting and producing seem to go hand in hand constantly.In DICP, a cross-cultural mental dialogue between the translator and the original author or utterances is a relevance-seeking, ostensive-inferential process. This process is carried on according to the source lexical information, logical information, and encyclopedic information as well as the translator's aesthetic qualities. Working his way through the source utterances to search for relevance, the translator constructs their contextual assumptions in his mind and understands what contextual effects are intended in the context, thus forming a comprehensive hypothesis of the author's intended intentions. In this process, he makes every effort to process correctly the optimal relevance to the author's communicative intention.DPCP is a dynamically-adjusting process from the translator to his intended receptor audience. His use of target language to convey the author's intentions is a continuous choice-making process characterized by variableness, mediation and adjustability. Guided by this optimal relevance, the translator consciously makes linguistic choices at the different levels of the target utterance-building ingredientsto convey the author's intentions or to manipulate the latter's informative intention by ensuring the cognitive consonance of the receptor audience. Meanwhile, the translator adjusts his choices to the audience, motivated by his different psychological aspects. In other words, he has to take into consideration the s...