| Relevance theory (RT) proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995) develops from the code model of semiotics, relevance maxim in cooperation principle proposed by Grice (1975) and inferential model of communication of the Grician pragmatics. It takes communication as an Ostensive-inferential process and presents a cognitive pragmatic interpretation to cognition and communication. Grounded on RT, Gutt (1991,1997) gives a relevant interpretation on translation and argues that the inferential nature of communication determines relevant inference is highly context-dependent. Context in RT is a psychological construction, and is not limited to information about the immediate utterance or context, covering expectations about the future, scientific hypothesis, religious beliefs, anecdotal memories, cultural presumptions and mental state as well. Therefore, context influences the accessibility of information and the ease of processing effort required. Gutt (1997) argues, as the interpretative use of language, target text (TT) should achieve interpretative similarity to source text (ST), that is, the sharing of explicatures and implicatures between the two texts. The inferential nature of human communication determines that proper language interpretation (translation) should be context-dependent. Correspondingly, the changing of context results in the difference in utterance meaning, and the dynamic context determines the translator's responsibility of activating TT readers' memory to achieve maximum similarity and optimal relevance of intertextual association by adopting certain adaptive strategies. In other words, the translator under the guidance of relevance principle should search for supreme convergence between ST and TT on the premise of finding a middleground between the ST writer's intentions and TT readers' expectations.This study, grounded on the framework of RT, makes a comment on classic Chinese verse translation by comparative study and cross-disciplinary transplantation approaches. On the one hand, from the perspective of literature pragmatics, it creatively adopts the theory of point of view (PV), which is a common concern in novel criticism, to probe into the impact of the translator's PV on the creation of idea realm, the transmission of cultural information, the representation of content and thereconstruction of image in verse translation, and to analyze the contextual effect produced by the characteristics of PV (stratification, orderliness, relevance and coherence). On the other hand, from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics, on the basis of RT by Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995) and adaptability theory (AT) 1>y Verschueren(1999), this study probes into the problem of language choice and contextual adaptation in the process of translation as the interpretive use of language. The study demonstrates that the choice of language and context (including physical world, social world and mental world) are correlatively adaptive and optimal relevance-targeted. The process of choice indicates the process of searching for optimal relevance. Contextual deficiency in translation is different from contextual default, and the deficient information which results in barrier to proper comprehension should be amplified through contextual adaptation measures, i.e., by contextual amplification, annotation, shift and paraphrase. The study points out that contextual amplification should be grounded on producing optimal relevance, meet the expectation of TT readers and realize communicative intention on the premise of constructing text coherence, faithfully representing the author's PV. Relevant adaptation is merely a choice of strategy, and the form doesn't correspond with the function. Thus, the so-called full equivalence is just an illusion. The core of successful text translation lies in searching for optimal relevance through certain adaptive measures, which is, by far, the optimal principle for translation as well.
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