| Pragmatics is roughly defined as the study of language use in context, and modern pragmatics has shifted its attention from the study of utterance production to primarily utterance interpretation. Relevance theory, proposed by Sperber and Wilson in their book Relevance: Communication and Cognition, is a brand-new theory in pragmatics. It explores the psychological mechanisms of utterance interpretation from a cognitive perspective, that is, in what way utterance interpretation is achieved in the process of information exchange. Relevance theory argues that the rationale of verbal communication is cognitive environments and optimal relevance is the principle governing verbal communication.This paper, by carrying out a contrastive study, first of all reviews the conventional approaches to verbal communication - the Code Model and the Semiotic Approach, the Inferential Model and the Gricean Approach, to name just a few - and reevaluates them, and then reveals that relevance theory has detected the defects of the conventional approaches to communication and has improved on them by proposing that communication is an ostensive-inferential process in nature. From the cognitive standpoint, the relevance-theoretic approach to communication can better expound how utterance interpretation is achieved in verbal communication.Based upon the results of the contrastive study in the paper, the author of the paper has drawn the following conclusions: verbal communication is intralingual, with a single ostensive-inferential process; translation, as a more complex form of verbal communication, is an interlingual intercultural communicating activity, with a double ostensive-inferential process; the translator, restrained by linguistic competence and cultural factors as well as the differences in cognitive construct and cognitive environments, is in a secondary communicative environments; translation, therefore, is to interpretively resemble the source text, following the principle of relevance.
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