The Explanatory Power Of Relevance Theory To Translation

The debate about translation is a long-term dispute among the translators and translation theorists. However, most of the traditional translation studies are usually piece and meal study without a unified theory for the guidance of translation studies in a general sense.Relevance Theory (RT for short), which was proposed by Sperber and Wilson in their book Relevance: Communication and Cognition, is the latest development in pragmatics, according to which human verbal communication is considered as an ostensive-inferential cognitive process and "every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance."RT is not meant for translation studies. However, as a science that explores general principles covering human communication and cognition, the influence of RT has greatly gone beyond the field of pragmatics itself, even extend to the field of translation. As a kind of cross-language and cross-cultural communication, the study of translation naturally falls in the domain of RT. The relationship between RT and translation is that the two are quite compatible and the former can explain such a complex decoding/encoding phenomenon as the latter in an ontological sense (Zhao Yanchun, 2003:117).In the framework of RT, translation can be defined as an act of double ostensive-inferential cognitive process whose success depends causally on consistency with the principle of relevance. The ultimate goal of translation is its optimal relevance to the source text. This rule of optimal relevance is believed to be able to match, to the greatest extent, the SL writer's intention with the TL readers' expectation.The principle of relevance heavily constrains the translation with regard to both what it is intended to convey and how it is expressed. To put it more clearly, translation should resemble the original in respects that make it adequately relevant to the target text reader by producing sufficient contextual effects; translation should be rendered in such a manner that it yields the intended interpretation in an economical way, involving optimal expenditure of processing efforts on the part of the target text receptor. Relevance-theoretical translation is such a powerful principle for giving translators guidance so as to achieve faithfulness on the one hand and on the other hand ensure readability.Translation of cultural-loaded words has long been considered as a hard nut to crack. Since cultural-loaded words are full of cultural connotations which are strongly rooted in the specific culture, thus they will pose great difficulties for the understanding for people with different cultural background. This problem can be effectively accounted for under the guidance of relevance theoretic translation theory.The purpose of this thesis is to explore the true nature and general law of translation from the perspective of RT. The other goal of the study is to form a preliminary framework of relevance-theoretic account of translation and adopt RT to expound translation phenomena and direct translation practice, particularly the translation of cultural-loaded words.