On The Applicability Of Relevance Theory To Translation

Translation is one of the important measures of cross-cultural communication. Translation theorists and students alike have given various and immense accounts of translation, but most of them haven't explored and studied translation from the perspective of the nature of translation. In turn, they hold different opinions on some basic issues and consequently fail to reach agreements on them. However, the advent of Relevance Theory opens up a new avenue for translation study, and leads them to explain translation phenomena in an ontological sense.This paper adopts qualitative analysis to discuss about Relevance Theory's applicability to translation in an attempt to use Relevance Theory to help to guide translation activities. Relevance Theory is a new pragmatic theory, and its primary focus is about cognition and communication. Relevance Theory and translation are quite compatible with one another. The former can explain such a complex decoding/encoding phenomenon as the latter in an ontological sense, and it regards the latter as an act of ostensive-inferential (intralingual and interlingual) interpretation of a source text. In the process of decoding/encoding, relevance plays a vital role and determines the degree that the translator can understand the source text as well as the selection of information. Moreover, Relevance Theory has great explanatory powers in translation. In the framework of Relevance Theory, translation is possible; it is important to realize communicative efficacy in translation, and under the premise of ensuring communicative efficacy, the translated version is supposed to try to converge with the source text; default is unavoidable in the translation process, this is because of human beings' limited cognitive processing abilities and language cultural idiosyncrasies. Owing to the dynamic features of translation in terms of cognition and relevance, this paper further proposes the transference of optimal relevance as the criteria of translation criticism.The results of this paper prove that Relevance Theory is applicable to translation and can effectively guide translation practice. In turn, a preliminary framework of relevance-theoretic approach to translation can be formed: the translator is supposed to regard relevance as the yardstick and communicative intention as the goal and try to make the translated version converge with the source text...