Translation Strategies For English Majors In Light Of Relevance Theory

Self-evidently, the competence of translating is necessity for English majors. First, as a means of communication, translation is used for multilingual notices. Then it is a transmitter of culture. And then especially as far as English majors are concerned, it is a technique for learning foreign language, because it can demonstrate the learner's knowledge of the foreign language.Therefore, the ultimate goal of the paper is to find solutions for English majors to improve their translational competence. But the paper first does a research on the five types of problems that usually appear in translations of English majors: omission, addition, misformation, misordering and blends. And in order to better illustrate those problems and have a better understanding of the present status of English majors'translational competence, a case study on translation of TEM8 is conducted.Then Gutt's relevance-theoretic account of translation, based on Sperber and Wilson'relevance theory, is introduced to serve as a guidance of our study. According to Gutt, both indirect translation and direct translation are important. There is no theoretical necessity for a translator to follow the approach of either indirect or direct form. It mostly depends on the translator's presumption of the cognitive environment of receptor readers. What is more, the translator has to undertake two totally different tasks: as readers/audience and as writers/communicators.And lastly within the framework of relevance theory and under the study of problems that students often meet with in the process of translating, the present author puts forward three suggestions: to infer the informative and communicative intentions of the original; to convey all and only those explicatures and implicatures from the original without putting the audience to unnecessary processing effort; to make intentions of the translator and expectations of the receptor readers meet.