Relevance Theory In Translation

This paper applies Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory, optimal relevance principle in particular, to the matter of text meaning in translation. The stress is put on the communicability of text meaning, not merely the generating side or the receiving side. And it is hoped to explain how all the factors, like text discourse, translator's preunderstanding and cultural differences contribute to the meaning realization in the light of "relevance". By applying relevance theory, this paper first criticizes three incorrect viewpoints on text meaning in translation—text meaning as information, text meaning as the original author's intention and text meaning as its function. Then, it proposes that what should be transferred by translation, a communicative activity, is pragmatic meaning, which is the contextual effect a text brings about in its target reader's mind in the light of relevance. To obtain the pragmatic meaning of a text, a translator should be familiar with the subject, the field and the related knowledge of that text, and relate the semantic meaning with his cognitive context to infer a maximal contextual effect at the cost of relatively minimal cognitive effort. The cognitive context used by a translator in his inferential process includes previous assumptions and encyclopaedic entries of concepts, and both of them are extremely important to meaning realization. When choosing words and phrases in target language to express the pragmatic meaning, a translator...