Application Of Relevance Theory To The Practice Of Literary Translation

As a new cognitive pragmatic theory, relevance theory greatly influences western pragmatics. Nowadays, its research has been beyond the field of pragmatics, and translation is one of the disciplines significantly influenced. Relevance theory provides the translation studies with a pragmatic perspective. Relevance theory, though not meant for translation but proposed as a foundation for cognitive science, is powerful in accounting for translation. This thesis attempts to apply the relevance theory to literary translation, and the optimal relevance is to be considered as the guideline for translation. And this thesis aims at exploring three issues of translation theory and practice: equivalence, translatability, and the translator's style, and exploring how to explain them from a relevance-theoretic framework. In order to explain the application of the relevance theory in literary translation, the author of the present thesis has selected some typical examples from three translated versions of the novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles for specific analysis.According to the relevance theory, language communication is a cognitive process, which must be carried on by inference. Besides, Sperber and Wilson propose relevance principles with great interpretive effects. Relevance theory shifts the key point of pragmatics from utterance production to utterance understanding and points out that language communication is an ostensive-inferential process. The success of communication depends on two conditions: (1) manifestness, and (2) relevance. The goal of human communication is not the maximal relevance, but the optimal relevance. The audience expects to obtain adequate contextual effects with minimal processing effort. The central concepts included in the relevance theory, such as cognitive environment, cognitive efforts, and contextual effect, are introduced to account for the translation phenomena.Translation is a kind of cross-cultural communication. Relevance theory, being a cognitive pragmatic theory guiding communication, has most powerful explanatory power for translation. Under the framework of relevance theory (RT), translation can be defined as a dynamic process and act of ostensive-inferential verbal (intralingual or interlingual) interpretation of language. First, in order to comprehend the original author's communicative intentions correctly, the translator has to search for relevance of information through context during the course of receiving the source language information. The process of searching for relevance is the process of cognition and inference. And then, combining the communicative intentions and the target reader's expectation, the translator has to decide what to interpret and how to interpret basing on the principle of relevance. Under the framework of RT, the explanation to translation is dynamic and dialectical. It can seize the nature of translation and has positive significance in guiding translation Practice.Relevance theory is a new theory emerged in the study of pragmatics. Relevance theory is not intended for translation, but it is powerful to account for translation phenomena. Like anyother theories which can guide translation studies, relevance theory is also not perfect. Though it cannot cover all the translation theories and explain all the translation facts, it provides a new perspective for translation studies. Paying much attention to this aspect will be helpful for the further study of translation. Indeed, we can go along the path that relevance theory has paved for us, in the hope of seeking a better way to explore translation.