Relevance Theory And The Dynamics Of Translation

Relevance theory is a cognitive pragmatic theory with great influence in the West recently. The influence of this theory has greatly gone beyond the field of pragmatics itself, even extended to the field of translation. Translation is a kind of cross-cultural communication. Relevance theory, being a cognitive theory guiding communication has the most powerful explanatory power as regards translation. "The relationship between relevance theory and translation is that the two are compatible with each other, and the former can explain such a complex decoding/encoding phenomenon as the latter in an ontological sense." (Zhao Yanchun, 2001:190).The author of this paper supports the view that translation is dynamic instead of static and rigid. Translation behavior is carried out between original author, translator and target readers. During this process, the translator should transfer culture and the author's various intentions to the target readers. From this aspect, translation is a dynamic communicative process. In translating, the translator should make complex analysis and inference. In this sense, translation is also a dynamic cognitive process. Translation extremely emphasizes contextual factors, therefore, it cannot avoid being a dynamic pragmatic process. As a matter of fact, these three aspects are not divided absolutely in practice, the intention of the author to separate them is just for the sake of the convenience of study. In addition, the multiplicity of translating strategies also embodies the dynamic characteristics of translation.Relevance theory holds that one has to search for relevance of information (i.e. making contextual assumptions) through context during the course of receiving natural language information, if he wants to comprehend natural language correctly. The process of searching for relevance is one of cognition and inference and also one that takes efforts. "In the relevance...