Relevance Theory And Chinese-English Tourism Translation

This thesis explores a common problem in Chinese tourism translation: the problem of translating all the information in Chinese tourism texts faithfully without taking the acceptability of the target readers into consideration. Taking one English translation of the Palace Museum as a sample text, the author analyzes this problem from the perspective of the relevance theory proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson.The relevance theory regards communication as an ostensive-inferential process based on the mutual manifestness of the cognitive environment of the speaker and the audience, and holds that what are conveyed in this process are the informative intention and the communicative intention of the speaker. The audience gets the contextual effects of the new assumptions in the speaker's ostension and infers her~3 intention. In this process, relevance is the main factor that determines the inferential process of the audience: The greater the contextual effects, the greater the relevance of a new assumption in a context. The processing effort involved in achieving contextual effects is another factor influencing the relevance of an assumption. Other things being equal, the greater the processing effort, the lower the relevance. According to the principle of relevance, every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance.Since translation can also be seen as a kind of communication, the translation process can be defined as "an act of ostentive-inferential intralingual or interlingual interpretation of a source text", and the principle of relevance theory also applies to the translation process. So in the fourth part of the thesis, the author analyzes the translation of the informative function and the vocative function of the Chinese tourism text and holds that the translator should take the acceptability of the target readers into consideration and convey in the translation an optimal relevance to the target readers.