A Relevance-theoretic Account Of The Translation Of Culture-loaded Words

This thesis seeks to account for the translation of culture-loaded words from the relevance-theoretic perspective. Relevance theory, although initially proposed to describe cognition in human communication, has provided a reasonable and unified theoretical account for translation as a product as well as a process. According to relevance theory, the goal of human communication is to achieve optimal relevance-an expectation on the part of the hearer that his endeavors at interpretation will yield adequate contextual effects at minimal processing effort.Based on this notion of optimal relevance, existing strategies for handling culture-loaded words are examined and analyzed. The author ventures a general criterion governing the translation of culture-loaded words: when translating this category of lexical items, choose the procedure that is consistent with the search for optimal relevance. With this criterion, the author hopes that translators will become aware of the importance of the cognitive environment into which they are translating, not only with regard to the content to be translated, but with regard to the nature of the whole act of communication in which they are involved.