A Relevance Approach On English Translation Of Chinese Tourism Material

Recent years, the applied research referring to Relevance theory opens up the new scope for other researches in linguistics, no exception for translation study. This thesis aims at studying and exploring English translation of Chinese tourism books from the perspective of relevance theory. The proposals of relevance theory have introduced new angles of communication and cognition into the study of translation beyond the conventional linguistic scope. Relevance takes the language communication as the cognitive process of ostention and inference; it is the ostensive-inferential process to cognitive environment. It is because of the optimal cognitive model-relevance that communicators can understand each other well. The central concepts included in the relevance theory, such as cognitive environment, cognitive efforts, contextual effect, and most of all relevance, are introduced to account for the translation phenomena in translating tourism material which the traditional translation notions fail to explain. In the framework of relevance, translation is a special form of inter-lingual communication, and the translation process is defined as a dual ostensive-inferential one, in which the translator plays the central role of assessing the cognitive environments of the writer and the target reader and the cognitive ability of the target reader. Owing to different cognitive environments, the standard of a successful communication is not "equivalence" or "faithfulness" but transference of optimal relevance, which means that the target reader may obtain the similar context effects without gratuitous efforts. So long as they are consistent with the relevance standard, all kinds of translation orientations and strategies may reconcile to serve different translation purposes. To put it clearly, some typical examples will be analyzed with comparison of characteristics of English and Chinese tourist material, and differences of both languages will be revealed. Under the guidance of relevance theory, suitable versions of tourism materials will be chosen according to foreigners' habits. The research mainly focuses on the natural sceneries. The author's effort is to improve and enrich the translation of tourism material on natural sceneries in our nation, and to provide a new approach to and standard for translation.