A Study On Optimal Relevance In Translation Of Sino-English Discourses

The proposal of relevance theory is a great contribution to linguistic field, which was first proposed by Sperber and Wilson in 1986, and which looks at linguistic phenomena from a new perspective. It is based on the notion of communication and regards communication to be an ostensive-inferential process, which involves human beings' cognition, mental organism and contextual effects. What is essentially important in relevance theory is the notion of relevance. In order to achieve successful communication between the communicators, their utterances have to be consistent with the principle of relevance, and communicators have to pursue optimal relevance between their utterances and their contextual effects. In this sense, it is also a great contribution to translation studies, for translation is also an act of communication that has been widely recognized in the past decades. Gutt (2004) holds that, in the framework of relevance theory, translation not only is an act of communication, but also is an interlingual interpretive use, which should be consistent with the principle of relevance; and what is worth mentioning here is that translation pursues optimal relevance as its final purpose. This thesis aims at presenting how the principle of relevance functions in translation, how important contextual effects and optimal relevance are in the procession of information's and intention's conveyance between the invisible original author, the translator and the target language audience. In the framework of relevance theory, there are two rounds of communication occurring: one round of communication between the original author and the translator, the other round between the translator and the target language audience. Therefore, during the procession of translation, the translator plays an essential role, who is responsible for successful communication and the achievement of optimal relevance. And this thesis will justify the feasibility of optimal relevance with the translation analysis of discourses between Chinese and English as evidence. But relevance theory is not trying to build up a principle or theory for translation, it just provides an account for translation phenomena. Compared with former translation approaches or principles, relevance theory is a new way to view...