On Pragmatic Translation From The Viewpoint Of Relevance Theory

Relevance Theory for the study of verbal communication offers a new approach to pragmatics. In Relevance Theory, the pursuit of relevance in communication depends on the speaker-intended context and inference. However, in an interlingual communication, because of relevance distance (What is relevant in one environment may not always be relevant in another.), in order to recognize the speaker-intended meaning and ensure a successful communication, the communicator should make efforts, which depends on the degree of relevance to the context the communicators lie in.Pragmatic translation, an act of interlingual communication, is to bridge the cultural and contextual gap between the text producer and the target reader, so as to achieve the communicative efficacy between them. But because of relevance distance across cultural communication, the context used by the original writer is not always identical to the one envisaged by the translator and the target reader. Therefore, in the case, if a translator doesn't want to quote the original writer out of context, a translator should be qualified to select the optimal relevance from the diverse potential relevance provided by SL imd SLT. In translation, the pursuit of relevance is not only the pursuit of information relevance between utterances, but also of cultural relevance. Thus, disputes will arise in pragnatic translation.So, first, the paper will focus on the relationship between pragmatic translation and RT. Second, under the relevance-theoretic framework, the nature of pragmatic translation is an act of a dual ostensive-inferential interlingual communication. Third, because of relevance distance, the pursuit of the optimal relevance about translation validity is a dynamic process involving many elements. According to RT, translation validity is determined by the degree of the similarities between the source and target language. Finally, in order to bridge the gap between the source and target language, a translator should look for appropriate translating strategies to achieve the optimal translation validity and settle disputes arising in pragmatic translation. All these can be reasonably solved under the framework of RT.It can be concluded that Relevance Theory can guide and interpret translation process. It can help a translator to pursue the optimal relevance to the context envisaged by the original writer and to the context of the intended reader. In this sense, the importance of RT cannot be ignored in translation process.