Relevance And Technical Translation---A Study Of Technical Translation In Theory

Technical translation practitioners have been looking for a specific translation theory to account for and guide their specific work for many years. But to their regret, they failed to find a completely satisfactory one. This paper is dedicated to a proposal for a relevance-theoretic approach to practical technical translation. An attempt is made to explore how useful the relevance theory is for technical translation, what the nature of technical translation is and what kind of technical translation model there will be in the relevance-theoretic framework.Rather than a discussion of translation techniques for technical translation, as many books and articles have done so, the main effort of this paper is engaged into the research of discovering the real mechanism of technical translation. The results of the research are very encouraging, which prove that relevance theory is very powerful in accounting for technical translation, and a set of formulas describing the mechanism of technical translation have been developed. Accordingly, the main thrust of this study is twofold: 1. Introduce a new theory ---- Relevance Theory ----into the field of technical translation, 2. Discovering the real mechanism of technical translation through exploring a range of technical translation phenomena and showing how they can be accounted for in the relevance-theoretic framework.This paper consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 begins with an introduction to the purpose of the study, the research status quo and a critical evaluation. Chapter2 introduces basic notions of relevance theory as found in Sperber and Wilson (1986). Chapter3 explores the relationship between relevance theory and technical translation and argues the principle of relevance is just the principle of technical translation. Chapter4 reviews the previous technical translation theory from the relevance theoretical point of view. Chapter5 uses the relevance theoretic approach to explore the mechanism of technical translation. Chapter6 concludes the results of this research.