On The Translation Of Meaning: In The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Relevance theory, though not meant for translation but proposed as a foundation for cognitive science, is powerful in accounting for translation. It provides translation with a unified theoretical framework, which can be regarded as a basis for its ontological and methodological considerations. The translation of meaning is central to any paper or book shedding light on translation. This paper chooses to discuss meaning translation from the perspective of relevance theory, tackling the comprehension and expression of implicature and explicature by providing models of translation to them respectively. This paper also redefines the relationship among the original writer, the translator and the target reader as well as the standard of translation. My paper is composed of three chapters.In Introduction, the merits and demerits of code model and inferential model are briefly introduced. By listing some of its essential ideas, Relevance Theory is proved to be a sound theory for approaching communication by uniting the two models. On this basis, a relevance-theoretic approach to translation is outlined.In Chapter One, the position of the interpretive school is defended by analyzing the linguistic, communicative, interpretive schools' conception on meaning-the focus of translation. The latter part of this chapter is devoted to a discussion of implicature and explicature as well as the characteristics of implicature.In Chapter Two, the thesis first addresses the different inferential logic on implicature and explicature in Sperber & Wilson's pragmatics, then elaborates the comprehension process in attaining the desired implicature and explicature and other echoic use of language. Context, an important psychological construct in Relevance Theory, plays an important role in translation. The relationship among the original writer, the translator, and the target readers is redefined.In Chapter Three, a model of translation is proposed with reference to Professor Zhao Yanchun's theoretic advancement. In relevance-theoretic translation theory, the transference of communicative intention is prior to that of informative intention. Literal translation and free translation are given a new facet of meaning in terms of Relevance Theory. Thereconstruction of style in the translation work has much to do with the occasion of relevance and carrying over of communicative clues. The remaining part of this chapter focus on the explication of implicature and function of Optimal Relevance in the translation of implicature. The Relevance Theory's standard is used to justify a piece of translation work.