The Relevance-Adaptation Theory And Its Application In Translation

The static contrast of the source text with the target text has been proved to be imperfect in the exploration of translation theory. There is a pressing demand of probing into the translator's mind in the course of translation in translation study.The Relevance Theory has a great interpretive power in accounting for translation, but is inadequate in its descriptive aspect. The Adaptation Theory is strong in description but weak in interpretation. By combining their respective strong points, this research tentatively proposes the Relevance-Adaptation Theoretic Approach to explain and describe the dynamics of translation by exploring the mental process of translators. According to this new approach, translation is both an ostensive-inferential process containing the optimal relevance and a continuous choice-making process. In the course of Discourse-Interpreting Communicative Process, the translator will manage to find out the optimal relevance to the author's communicational intentions. In the course of Discourse-Producing Communicative Process, the translator will make linguistic adaptations at every level of language structure so as to convey appropriately the author's intentions in the target language. The process of adaptation is also a process of pursuing relevance. A translator will first of all adjust his choices to those that have relevant relationships.The Relevance-Adaptation Theoretic Approach to translation is: translation is not a static process of code transfer but a dynamic behavior, in which the translator will take relevance as his criterion, adaptation as his method and the author's intention as his destination to make his translated text more convergent to the original.