Relevance Theory And Translation: Study On The Translation From Perspective Of Relevance Theory

The debate about translation is a long-term dispute among the translators and translation theorists. Fo0rmal equivalent or functional equivalent, free translation or literal translation, semantic translation or communicative translation are always all among the debates. Sperber and Wilson propose relevance theory, which claims that communication is an ostensive-inferential process involving informative intention and communicative intention. After assessing and evaluating the audience's cognitive environment and cognitive ability, the communicator conveys her communicative intention through utterance. And then the audience decodes and infers the communicator's intention by applying the information of the utterance combined with the contextual assumptions. Relevance theory claims that communications fall naturally into two distinct modes of language use: descriptive use and interpretive use.In the framework of relevance theory, translation is viewed as a kind of communication in nature but across language boundaries. Some "translation" phenomena in the traditional concept of "translation" are actually interlingual descriptive use of language, such as advertisement, manual, and description etc. In these cases, the SL communicator is trying to address the TL audience directly with the help of the translator and the success of the translation is not due to the resemblance to the original but the degree of relevance to the TL audience. So, this attentive thesis would exclude these above-mentioned cases from the notion of the translation. Relevance theory views the translation as a sort of interlingualinterpretive use. The crucial point is to represent what the original communicator thought, said or wrote. That the original and the new text belong to different languages is the only distinct between the translation and other instances of interpretive use. Relevance theory offers guidance for the translation. For example, the translation should resemble the original only in aspects expected to help the TT readers to interpret the TT; the translation should be clear and natural in expressions. Relevance theory can be applied to effectively account for the translation.