A Model Of Translation Of Politeness Based On Relevance Theory

Sperber and Wilson developed the Relevance Theory of communication. Itdid not take long before it was applied to translation. This dissertationattempts to illustrate the model of the translation of politeness. Translation is across-linguistic sociocultural practice, in which a text in one language isreplaced by a text with equivalent relevance degree in another. The originalcontains three variables: which, once summed, give the weightiness of theface-threatening act and the choice of stimulus is decided.The speaker's choice of stimulus is constrained by the need to use astimulus, which is optimally relevant, one which guides the addressee to theintended interpretation without any gratuitous processing effort.The translator then arrives at the speaker's intended interpretation of hisactions, evaluates the relevance degree, and figures out the contextualresemblance (higher/lower resemblance leads to overt/covert translation).Thus produces a covert/overt translation (these two relations form acontinuum, the so-called covert/overt translation is actually a point in it) withequivalent relevance degree (as close as possible).