The Application Of Relevance Theory To Interpretation

Interpretation, as an important way of communication between people from different countries, is becoming increasingly important nowadays. Since China opened her door to the outside world in 1978, the demand for interpretation has increased dramatically. With the rapid development of interpretation, the research on interpretation has gained more attention. However, the study of interpretation in China has long been ignored and many researchers are still experience-oriented, lacking sufficient theoretical support. Therefore, we should deepen the theoretical research in this field.Interpretation is an interlingual and intercultural communication and always has been studied from the perspective of communication. Relevance theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson, as a communicative theory of cognitive pragmatics, is dedicated to the studies of ostensive-inferential communication and orientated to establish a general principle of interpreting the inner mechanism of human communication. It has been widely and successfully applied to analyzing stylistic features, translation, syntax, discourse, and media discourse. Therefore this thesis is trying to apply the relevance theory to explaining the process of interpreting and suggest some strategies for related fields of interpretation from the relevance theoretical point of view.This thesis first reviews the history and development of interpretation, analyzes the situation of interpretation both in China and abroad, and then gives a brief introduction to some basic notions in relevance theory which are related to interpretation, such as communication, relevance, context, and principle of relevance. Holding that relevance theory can bring a new angle to interpretation research, this thesis then analyzes the process of interpretation from the perspective of relevance theory. According to this theory, instead of just encoding-decoding process, interpretation can be regarded as ostensive-inferential communication which requires the interpreter to act as both information receiver and information transmitter. In this process, the interpreter should choose the proper context and relate the speaker's ostensive stimuli with his cognitive environments to infer the speaker's intention, and then take into consideration the target audience's cognitive environment and reproduce this intention. Actually this process is the process of seeking and transferring the optimal relevance of the speaker. Based on this relevance-theoretic account of interpretation process, this thesis presents some implications on interpretation issues, suggesting some strategies for both interpreters and interpretation teachers to follow.All in all, this thesis tries to explore interpretation within the framework of relevance theory, suggesting a relevance-theoretic account of interpretation as well as some strategies to be adopted in interpretation practice.