A Relevance-Theoretic Approach To Chinese-English Tourism Translation

This thesis is a pragmatic exploration of Chinese-English (C/E) tourism translation from the perspective of relevance theory developed by Sperber and Wilson. This study intends to investigate the workings of the translator's mind and to give an account of how a translator carries on cross-cultural communication with the original author and his target audience in C/E tourism translation.The domain of this research is the translator's mental faculties and the main thrust of this study is to account for aspects of C/E tourism translation by probing the translator's communicative competence assumed to be part of human minds.The present study is an inter-disciplinary research, and it borrows some important insights from relevance theory which is a new initiative on communication from the cognition angle, and it provides a new approach to C/E tourism translation.Relevance-theoretic approach is a new cross-cultural and translator-centered theoretical paradigm in which C/E tourism translation is both a relevance-seeking and an ostensive-inferential communicative process. This process is carried on according to the source lexical information, logical information, and encyclopedic information as well as the translator's aesthetic qualities.In C/E tourism translation, the translator stands in the middle of cross-cultural communication between the original author and the target audience. The translator makes inferences from a combination of the original utterances and their contextual assumptions, and grasps the optimal relevance. Other things being equal, the greater the contextual effects achieved, the greater its relevance; the smaller the processing effort required, the greater the relevance.Guided by the optimal relevance, the translator develops his subjectivity to convey the original author's intentions. To that end, the translator should provide the optimal contextual effects without putting the target audience to gratuitous processing efforts. As a communicator, the translator has to take into account his intentions as well as the cognitive environments and acceptability level of his audience, and he should make his intentions meet target audience's expectations.During this tentative study, the thesis arrives at the conclusion that relevance theory can shed new light on C/E tourism translation.