On Translation In The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

The 1960s and 1970s witnessed the prosperity of linguistic school in the western translation studies. Representatives Eugene A. Nida, J. C. Catford, Peter Newmark, etc. deem that translation is a linguistic science and translation activity is a process of pure language transference. The key point is to contrast the unit meaning between the source language and target language so as to achieve equivalence in content. It views translation as a precise science and the regular correspondence and equivalence it emphases constrains the translator's subjective initiative. Thus this closed and static translation paradigm was gradually replaced by the afterward thriving of "cultural turn" in translation. The focus of the cultural school is cultural studies instead of language transference. Representatives Susan Bassnett, Andre Lefevere, Lawrence Venuti, etc. pay their attentions to many factors out of linguistic structures: philosophy, politics, history, culture, poetics, ideology and so on, examining translation in a larger cultural context, thus the focus was changed from a linguistic texts to the cultural world. However, the attitude of the cultural school towards the traditional translation studies is not well critically inherited, but nearly totally reversed and rejected. It almost leaves aside the linguistic factors in translation, or even replaces linguistic studies with cultural studies so that culture becomes the noumenon of translation studies, leading the multi-disciplinary feature of translation studies gradually to be a-disciplinary.However, translation is an interlingual and intercultural communication. As a pragmatic cognitive theory, RT (Relevance Theory) has its powerful explanatory force to translation since it was used to guide communication and its influence has gradually spread over translation field. It grasps the essence of translation problem—relevance, which has the great significance of specifying translation criteria. In light of RT, translation is dynamic and dialectical and it is an act of ostensive-inferential interpretation of a source text. Translation goes among the original writer, the translator and the target language reader, and the translator plays a key role in this process. The translator has to transmit the original culture and writer's intentions to the target text receptor, so translation is a dynamic process of communication; translation is a dynamic cognitive and psychological process which involves complicated analysis and inference; translation should consider a variety of contextual elements, so it is a dynamic pragmatic process (the three are not completely separate). A successful translation must be a reproduction of optimal relevance of the original. RT holds that to correctly understand a natural language, one must search for relevant information through context in the process of receiving the information. The course of searching for relevance is a dynamic cognitive-inferential process and an effort-taking pragmatic process. In the framework of RT, translation strategies such as literal translation/ free translation, foreignization/ domestication are not simply opposite, but compatible; and translatability/ untranslatability are not simply contradictory, but dialectical.This thesis begins with the contributions and limitations of traditional linguistic school and cultural school, probes into the basic concepts and ideas of RT and its powerful explanatory force to translation phenomenon, and further highlights its value on translation studies through illustrating its solving of the many conflicting problems long-lasted in translation.