The Relevance-Theoretic Approach To Translation Of Tourist Brochures

The thesis aims at studying and exploring the translation of tourist brochure by applying the theory of relevance. The proposal of the theory put forth by Sperber and Wilson has introduced new angles of communication and cognition into the study of translation beyond the conventional linguistic scope. The central concepts included in the relevance theory, such as cognitive environment, cognitive efforts, contextual effect, and most of all relevance, are introduced to account for the translation phenomena in translating tourist brochures which the traditional translation notions fails to explain. In the framework of relevance, translation is a special form of inter-lingual communication, and the translation process is defined as a dual ostensive-inferential one, in which the translator plays the central role of assessing the cognitive environments of the writer and the target reader and the cognitive ability of the target reader. Owing to different cognitive environments, the standard of a successful communication is not 'equivalence' or 'faithfulness' but transference of optimal relevance, which means that the target reader may obtain the similar context effects without gratuitous efforts. So long as they are consistent with the relevance standard, all kinds of translation orientations and strategies may reconcile to serve different translation purposes. To put it clearly, the author of the present thesis has collected some typical examples for specific analysis, and suggested several strategies in accordance with the standard to show how the relevance theory guides tourist brochures translation practice. The author's effort is to improve and enrich the translation of tourist brochures in our nation, and to provide a new approach to and standard for translation.