A Pilot Research On The Translation Of Chinese And English Idioms From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

As a kind of independent and stable expressional method for language created by people in the practice and their daily life, idioms are the crystal and reduction of language, as well as the central reflection for all the characteristics of language. Since idioms not only comprise abundant visualized impersonal substances, but also bear polychrome feelings and vivid features of an ethnic, it is very significant for translation to transmit the meanings consisting in the idioms in source language to the audience of target language effectively, at the same time, retain the cultural connotation of the idioms in source language.Relevance Theory was first put forward by Sperber and Wilson in their work—Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Under the framework of relevance theory, communication, in nature, is a kind of ostensive-inferential act, that is, the speaker expresses his informative and communicative intention to the hearer through ostensive act, and the hearer, combining with his cognitive context, recognizes the intention of the speaker according to the information in the speaker's ostensive act. In the process of communication, the two sides of the communication take the optimal relevance as their mutual tropism. In the year 1991, Gutt advanced the relevance theory by combining it with translation, and proposed Relevance Translation Theory. He claims that the successful translation is, but only is, the intention of the source text communicator should resemble with the expectation of the target text communicator in cognitive environment. In the framework of relevance theory of translation, translation is a kind of inferential process involving a brain mechanism, and a kind of communication, as well as an ostensive-inferential (intralingual and interlingual) interpretation on the source language. It's the translator's responsibility to make a rational inference and choice on codes, according to the intention of the communicator in source text and the cognitive construction and environment of the communicator in target text, so as to make the communicator in target text find out the optimal relevance between the translation and context, that is to say, the translation must take the optimal relevance as its tropism.Based on the specialty of the translation of idioms, this paper made a pilot research on the explanatory power of relevance theory to translation from the perspective of relevance theory, and meanwhile, proposed a new viewpoint on the translation of Chinese and English idioms in accordance with that translation is a kind of special intercultural and translingual communication, and an ostensive-inferential interpretation on the source language as well. Finally, this paper concluded that the translation of idioms is just not only an interlingual transition between languages, but more importantly, a transition of the cultural connotation consisting in the idioms in different languages. When translating, the translator, according to the principle of optimal relevance, should try his best to make the translation highly close to the source language and well accepted by the audience in target language.