A Relevance-Theoretic Account Of Pragmatic Enrichment In Legal Translation

As a process of narrowing down the intrinsic problem of vagueness in natural language, pragmatic enrichment (PE) has great significance in the interpretation of meaning. However, PE has not aroused enough discussion in interlingual communication, let alone in the field of legal translation. The present study attempts to present a detailed discussion on PE in legislative text transltion from a relevance-theoretic perspective and the specific questions to be addressed herein are: What is the cognitive mechanism of PE in legal translation? What are the manifestations of PE in the translation of Chinese legislative texts? Will the translated texts exhibit any differences if PE is processed differently?PE in legislative text translation may be defined as a kind of inferential process in the understanding of the Chinese legislative texts and in the re-representation in their English translations. This pragmatic phenomenon may appear in lexical, syntactic and contextual levels. Specifically speaking, there can be different types of PE: deictic enrichment, conceptual enrichment, thematic enrichment, enrichment based on discourse relations and that based on implicatures.In terms of RT, PE is constrained by considerations of relevance, which means that only the enrichment which is consistent with the principle of optimal relevance is considered acceptable. In this process, the accessibility of contextual assumptions can be measured by two criteria: contextual effect and cognitive effort. This cognitive mechanism is supposed not only to explain the abovementioned types of PE, but also to provide a new perspective for quality assessment of legal translation.A number of examples collected from several Chinese legislative laws are used in the analysis of different types of PE and a case study on the comparison of different versions of a single Chinese law is performed with a view to examining the criteria for translation quality assessment. Based on the analysis of the data, the present study describes the manifestations of PE in translation, especially with legal consideration and proves that RT's criteria for translation quality assessment are feasible through the case study.The present study has made a contribution to the analysis of PE in legislative text translation and proves that RT may be applied to translation quality assessment. It is hoped that a translation quality assessment model may be established on the basis of the present study and that further studies on PE may be carried out in relevant fields such as court interpreting.